


Floor 13: A New View

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Series: Floor 13 [2]
Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Bondage, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mind Control, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-07-21
Updated: 2003-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:24:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 28
Words: 33,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to Floor 13: An Impossible View, this chronicles the months following the escape of the Starbug crew from the Brig.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New Arrivals

**Author's Note:**

> Red Dwarf characters belong to Grant Naylor. Shayne, JayVee and O'Connor belong to me.
> 
> N.B. this fic is marked 'Rape/Non-Con' as one of the characters has sex under the influence of mind-altering drugs.

Kryten takes the sensor pad off JayVee's flat belly and smiles plastically. 'Congratulations are in order, it seems, ma'am,' he says, nodding at the screen.

JayVee looks at the frozen image on the screen. 'Oh, no,' she says softly. 'Oh, no.'

'I would have thought that this was good news, ma'am, surely? A child is a great blessing. And if you're at all worried about the birth, well, I'm sure we can get Miss Kochanski and Miss Shayne to assist.'

The flicker of a smile traces across JayVee's lips. 'If Shayne heard you call her that, she'd dismantle you. I can't believe you haven't learned yet... it's been ages!'

'One year, three months, and twelve days to be precise. I just can't get the hang of it,' the mechanoid admits.

'Kryten...'

'Sorry, ma'am.'

'Kryten, I really don't know if I can handle motherhood. I'm too young. I don't know anything!' JayVee fists up one hand and pounds it on the bed, sitting up. 'Oh well. It was bound to happen.'

'Ma'am?'

'Well, all the condoms have vanished from the stores. I'm sure Dave and Rimmer have used most of them. And there's no Pill, and nothing else,' JayVee says. 'In fact, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.'

'There's always the Depo Provera...'

'IT'S A BIT FUCKING LATE FOR THAT!' JayVee jumps off the bed and storms out. Kryten sighs, and looks at the still image on the monitor... the tiny foetus swimming silently in JayVee's womb.

* * *

'Oh God... don't stop _now_!' Lister's face is streaming with sweat. His hands are clenched around fistfuls of sheet, and he can still feel his fingernails digging into his palms.

Teasingly, Rimmer withdraws completely and circles the head of his cock around Lister's entrance, smearing lube everywhere. 'Stop _what_, Listy?'

A tortured moan is his only answer, and relenting for both their benefits, Rimmer pushes back inside his lover and within seconds comes inside him. He can feel Lister coming as well, that shudder and squeeze of... certain muscles... giving it all away.

'Ohhh. There's another cleaning job for Kryten.' Lister tries not to collapse into the mess on the sheets and fails as his tired legs give way. A rather disgusting squelch is the result. Rimmer tries not to laugh and has the same amount of success, giggles bubbling from this throat. He lowers himself with his lover, using him as a mattress, still buried deep within him.

'Rimmer?'

'Mmmm?'

'Krissie was saying the other day that it's ridiculous how we keep calling each other Lister and Rimmer,' Lister says.

'You were calling me 'God' before, I believe, would she like to know that?' Rimmer asks.

'Ha ha. Y'know, there was that old TV show _The X Files_, they never used each others' first names,' Lister says.

'Yes, but was it pornographic?' Rimmer pauses. 'With a name like that, it sounds like it.'

'No.'

'Oh.' Rimmer thinks again. 'And do you think she's right?'

Lister shrugs as much as he can with Rimmer lying all over him. 'Don't know. Get off.'

'I just did.' Rimmer's smirk is wasted on Lister, given that the latter has his head half-buried in his pillow.

'_Off_.'

Rimmer eases himself out and off of his bedmate. Lister groans as he feels Rimmer slide out of him.

'I'm hungry now,' Rimmer announces.

'I'm not surprised. Doing that -- twice - would make anyone hungry.'

'Come on, you silly bugger. Let's go and get some lunch, what say?'

'Okay, Arnold.'

There's a pause.

'Y'know, I think it just sounds wrong,' Lister says.

'Yeah.'

* * *

'Where th' bloody hell have you two been? It's ya turn in the cockpit, Dave, in case he's screwed ya brains out and ya forgot.'

'Morning, Shayne,' Lister and Rimmer say in unison, even though it's early afternoon.

Shayne bounces down the cockpit steps, apparently none the worse for wear after her double shift with the Cat. 'Youse lot seen Krissie this mornin'?'

'We've been a bit busy to go looking for your girlfriend,' Rimmer says, opening the fridge. 'Listy, your trainers are in here again.'

'Oh, good, I was wondering where they'd gone to.'

Shayne sighs. 'Get in th' cockpit, I'll bring ya in some lunch. Or breakfast. Or whatever th' hell meal ya up to.'

Lister passes the Cat in the cockpit doorway. The feline looks very tired, but perks up when he hears footsteps on the stairs and sees JayVee. 'Hey hey, baby! You're lookin' great! Better than me, almost!'

JayVee doesn't look all that great, actually. There are dark rings under her eyes, and Kochanski -- who has come down with her -- is holding her arm to keep her from falling. Shayne raises an eyebrow at this, but lowers it when JayVee pulls her arm away.

'Jesus, Kris, I'm not a cripple,' she snaps. 'I don't need you to baby me.' She looks down into the midsection. 'Dave, switch the autopilot on and come back out here, will you? I've got something to tell you all.'

Lister does so, joining the group in the midsection. The same look of puzzlement is surfacing on all faces, save for Kochanski's... she obviously already knows.

'What's up, baby?' the Cat asks.

'Where's my cat?' JayVee finds Madonna, the grey tabby, hiding under the scanner table, and picks her up. She hugs her close, and makes her announcement more into the cat's fur than to the assembled group. 'I'm pregnant.'


	2. New Arrivals

'Pregnant?' The Cat promptly keels over backwards, so overwhelmed by the wonderful news that he feels the need to faint.

'Pregnant? Hell's bells, Jayv, weren't ya takin' precautions?' Shayne asks.

'I'd've taken fucking precautions had there been any fucking precautions to take!' JayVee says. 'There isn't a condom left in the store cupboard -- and we know who's got them squirreled away, too.' She glares at Lister and Rimmer, who have the good grace to look embarrassed.

'We just--'

'I don't care what you just,' JayVee says before she can find out something she'd rather not know. 'I'm conscripting you both as babysitters. Starting now, I want people to store things that might be useful for this baby. Cat... Cat, get up, you prat.' She kicks the Cat in the side; they have an interesting relationship.

The Cat rolls over, gets up, and as soon as JayVee has a few quiet words with him, heads meekly up to their bedroom to start sewing velvet nappies or something.

'Jayv, I think it's great,' Kochanski says.

'You would. You don't have to cope with morning sickness and bloating and being grumpy and getting fat and having to get up to breastfeed at two AM,' JayVee says.

'When you put it like that, I don't think it's great any more,' Kochanski says. She hugs JayVee. 'Relax, everything's going to be fine. We're all here, we can all help you. And I'm sure there's benefits as well. I read somewhere that being pregnant can make you really... lustful.'

Shayne and JayVee exchange a look. 'It don' take gettin' knocked up to do that to our Jayv,' Shayne says, and JayVee seems to be smirking, albeit only a little.

'Fine, guys. Fine. I'll be optimistic. Then I'll probably die in childbirth or something fun like that.' She's still got that little smirk on her face, though, and one hand is settled comfortably against her stomach. 'I think, if you can excuse me, that I'll go up and practice that 'lustful' thing you mentioned, Kris.'

'Oh, we'll excuse you for that; I doubt anyone wants to see it down here,' Kochanski says, giving a final squeeze of the arm still around the blonde before letting her go.

* * *

A few hours later, everything is still more or less normal. Shayne has gone to the medical unit, complaining of an earache, seeking ear drops or something for the pain. JayVee and Lister are in the cockpit. Rimmer's trying to calm Kochanski down -- she's fretful over her girlfriend's ear trouble. The Cat is asleep. Kryten is cleaning.

It always seems to be in the most mundane of situations that bombshells strike, although as a general rule they're less literal than this one. You might be curled up on your bed with a lover -- one minute they're whispering sweet nothings, the next they're telling you something that will ruin your life. You might be at the doctor's for a routine checkup, and all of a sudden discover that your Pap smear results aren't quite as normal as she'd first thought. You might be chatting away idly on the Internet and discover that a close friend is lethally depressed.

_Wham!_

_Starbug_ rocks with the force of the impact -- something has hit the port side. There are two yelps from the cockpit. Kryten abandons his broom and waddles up the steps towards the sound. Rimmer takes his arm from around Kochanski -- and Lister or no Lister, the smell of her shampoo is very arousing, oh yes it is -- and follows the mechanoid, walking as briskly as he can to disguise the tumescent bulge in his trousers.

'What was that?'

JayVee is examining the damage report machine, her face solemn. 'I don't know,' she says. 'Whatever it was, it's not there any more.'

'Come on, Jayv, how can it not be there?' Kochanski joins Rimmer in the doorway. 'We all felt it.' She reaches out and pushes the emergency button to call the others to attention -- although given the force of the impact, they'll probably be on their way downstairs anyway.

'Kris! I just said it's not there. I'm not getting any mass readings at all.'

'No mass readings...' Kryten leans over JayVee and hits a few buttons on her console. The monitors mounted around the cabin come on, showing only stars. 'Mr Lister, sir, would you mind turning to port?'

Lister realises what Kryten's getting at, and his eyes widen. 'Krytes, you don't think... it's not that holoship, is it? How could they hit _Starbug_?'

'Incoming transmission,' Kryten says, sitting at the comms console.

'Punch it up,' Lister says.

'What holoship?' asks Rimmer, looking confused, like it's something he should know but doesn't.

'I remember that ship,' Kochanski says, and is it only Shayne, arriving behind her, who sees one little hand form into a fist? 'They were a bunch of snobs. They were _so_ rude.'

'Audio comms link ready,' Kryten says.

'Greetings, _Starbug_.' The voice is a familiar one. 'Apologies for the rather rude interruption, but there was no response to our handshakes. Is there something wrong with your comms system?'

'There was, but we're fixin' it,' Lister says. 'Is that you, ehm, Commander Crane?' A moment's pause in there to remember her name -- he never had much reason to commit it to memory, after all.

The visual link kicks into working order and the view on one of the monitors -- that of an elongated ship, mostly see-through, with the name _Enlightenment_ along the side -- changes to a woman's face. She has brown hair, swept back from a high forehead that's emblazoned with a H in a circle, and an arrogant face. The face softens slightly when she sees Lister.

'David Lister? It's been so long!'

'Yeah, kinda,' Lister says, thinking of years spent travelling, over two hundred years spent in deep sleep, and of course all the aeons of time unmeasurable in seconds or minutes, but only in terms of distance. 'Uh, how are you?'

But Crane's seen something that interests her more than making small talk with the Universe's slobbiest entity. Her eyes widen as she spots someone over Lister's shoulder. 'Arnie, is that _you_?'

All eyes turn to Rimmer, who, for the first time in his life, has no idea what to say.


	3. New Connections

'Arnie?' Crane repeats, a slightly puzzled look coming onto her face. 'You're not a hologram any more?'

Lister happens to be facing Rimmer when Rimmer's mouth flops open. _Who is this woman_? he's clearly thinking. But the words won't come out -- they're stuck down the back of his throat somewhere. All he can do is gape and lollygag like a stranded fish.

'I'm sorry, Commander,' Lister says, finally getting his own vocal cords to work. 'This isn't the Rimmer you knew. He's a different man... the Rimmer you knew left to become Ace Rimmer.'

It's Crane's turn to look confused, but she recovers a lot quicker than either of the men. 'Oh? My apologies. Where did you pick this version up?'

'Back on _Red Dwarf_, when it was reconstructed...' The confused look is reappearing on the hologram woman's face. 'Ehm, this could take a bit of explaining. D'you want to, y'know, beam over here for a while and we can sort it out?'

'Unless you'd prefer to come here. We've converted to a hard-light system, you know. That's how we were capable of ramming your ship.' She delivers this information in the same tone she used to inform Rimmer of the sex rules of the ship. How one person can be so blas about such a topic, Lister doesn't know, but he pauses before answering.

'Can you give us a minute?'

'Certainly,' Nirvana nods.

Lister switches the radio control from TALK-LISTEN to LISTEN and swivels around on his chair to face the rest of the room. 'What d'you think, guys?'

'No bloody way are ya gettin' me on that thing.' Shayne is adamant. 'They could switch t' soft light easy as, an' then where are ya? Fallin' through space without any flamin' oxygen, an' there ain't no _Heart of Gold_ out here to pick ya up, either.'

Kochanski stifles a snicker -- looks like Shayne's been doing some bedtime reading after all -- and nods. 'I agree. Just because they're capable of running on hard light doesn't mean they'll keep doing it if they get sick of us. Make them come over here, Dave.'

'Well, I think we should go over there,' Rimmer says. 'They haven't offered us any open animosity, and besides, can you imagine that woman wanting to sit on a milk crate and drink lager out of a cracked coffee mug? They probably have decent stuff over there.'

'How can they? At the moment they're still running an entirely soft-light system. Anything real would fall straight through. I'm with Shayne and Kris. If they want to chat, make them come here to do it,' JayVee says. Her hand is on her stomach and it's plain whose survival she's thinking of.

'Well, babe, I hate to disagree with you, but I think we should go over there. Like McDonald's-golden-arches-nostrils said, they haven't been threatening to us. If we make them come here, they might get tetchy and attack us!' the Cat says.

'Whatever,' JayVee says. 'Look, why don't you three boys go? Kris and Shayne and I can hold the fort back here, and Kryten can do whatever he feels like, although I'll point out that if they _do_ switch to soft light, he'll fall first, 'cause he's heavier.' This seems to worry Kryten, who volunteers to remain behind and finish his cleaning 'in case Ms. Crane decides to come here after you have seen their ship, sirs.'

Lister switches the mic back on. 'Righto, Commander, three of us are coming over. Do you still have your teleporter thingy?'

'Indeed.' Crane's voice holds a hint of laughter. 'And it's able to transport humans, too.'

'One last thing...' Lister pauses. 'That dude, Binks. He's not still there, is he?'

The laughter is gone from Crane's voice when she speaks next. 'No. In fact, there's been some... radical changes to the chain of command over here. But I'll discuss that further with you when you arrive.' Her face vanishes from the screen, and almost simultaneously the boys vanish from the cockpit. Kryten immediately dives for the pilot's yoke to keep them from barrelling into the side of the _Enlightenment_, and sets the auto-pilot to keep them close by the bigger ship without actually impacting with it.

'What do we do now?' JayVee asks.

Kochanski shrugs. 'We wait.'

* * *

Crane palms Lister and the Cat off onto a young female officer who introduces herself as Erin O'Connor, the CMO of the ship, a job that is largely redundant given the holograms' complete resistance to most infections, unless they are of a hologrammatic nature.

Rimmer is vaguely suspicious of Crane's motives as they head for the bridge, but naturally can't remember anything of their time together, not being the same Rimmer that Crane once loved.

'So what's this reorganising in hierarchy you mentioned?' he asks, trying to keep the subject of conversation in safe waters.

Crane shrugs. 'I made friends higher up. O'Connor's partly in charge of who gets switched off, since it's technically a medical process... life and death, that sort of thing. When I was sure she was trustworthy, I confided my plans to her. That very night, we saw to it that Platini and the others wouldn't be bothering us again, setting the system up so that I could become Captain and handpick my officers.'

'You killed them, didn't you? You killed this Platini guy...' Rimmer stops walking and stares at her. 'Crane, do you realise what you've done?'

'Of course.' Crane reaches out with an open palm, and Rimmer shies away expecting a slap, but she caresses his cheek instead, which is somehow worse... the insubstantial feel of the hard light is all wrong. 'You were the one who broke my programming and allowed me to feel emotions.'

'Not me, Crane. Some other Rimmer, and he's gone now.'

'Not really.' The ghost of a smile flickers over her lips. 'He wasn't erased, you see. Come and meet my First Officer, won't you?' She turns and keeps walking, her high heels making brisk little clicks on the corridor's floor.

Rimmer falls deeper into bewilderment with each step he takes. There's the puzzlement he feels over this woman, of course -- he doesn't know her and so it's bizarre that she seems to know him -- but there's more to it than that; the little spark of lust that burned as he comforted Kochanski earlier, the sparks he'd been feeling for weeks now around JayVee or Shayne, the growing flame he feels for this woman he's never met before. What about Lister? He doesn't know, and feels guilty for not knowing, just as he feels guilty for the feelings themselves.

His bewilderment is compounded further as he enters the bridge and sees just who Crane's First Officer is.

'McGruder?'

The geo-mapper dismisses him with a single cold look, speaking past him to Crane. ''Vana, I have that mind patch ready when you are. Erin will administer it.'

'She's touring the others around.'

'I'll call James up.' McGruder moves to the public address microphone and calls on James Barker to attend in the Drive Room, _urgently_.

'What mind patch? What are you talking about?' Rimmer can't keep the note of panic out of his voice. Crane has taken his arm, and he feels a pinch on the back of his left hand. Looking down, he sees the needle hanging out of it, the plunger half-depressed.

'I want _my_ Arnie back,' Crane says, expressionless. 'And this is the only way I'm going to get him.' She finishes injecting the contents of the needle into his hand, whatever they are -- an anaesthetic? Where did she keep it? How did she get it?

Rimmer opens his mouth to ask her what on Io she's talking about, but the world begins to fade around him, and he only has time to see a grey-haired man coming through the door behind her, carrying a doctor's bag, before reality vanishes and he falls under the spell of her secret potion.


	4. New Desires

Kochanski is getting antsy, and not in the good way. The guys have been gone, in her oh-so-humble opinion, just a little too long to be entirely innocent. Furthermore, when she tries to radio link to the _Enlightenment_, she gets no response. She may not be able to tell left from right, if you ask Lister, but she _can_ put two and two together and come up with suspicion.

At the moment, she's loath to wake Shayne and ask her opinion. The redhead would probably have some interesting ideas about this mystery, but half an hour ago, just after the boys were beamed over to the other ship, she went upstairs to get some sleep. Kochanski doesn't want to disturb her again -- she knows that Shayne is really hurting.

JayVee, however, is sitting just behind her, and JayVee she can ask.

'Jayv?'

'Mmmm?'

'Do you think the boys are all right?'

JayVee looks up from the console -- not that she's using it, but her book is propped on it -- and rolls her eyes. 'Kris, they survived for years in space before you came along. I'm sure they've squeezed out of a few tight places in their time. Just be patient. They're probably getting the grand tour or something.'

Kochanski sighs, looks back out of the front windscreen, and suddenly wishes she had a cigarette -- funny, since the last time she smoked was when she was still in school, years ago.

'You're probably right,' she says, meaning it.

JayVee nods, and goes back to _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban._

* * *

Lister and the Cat have been dutifully following O'Connor around the ship for what seems like hours. Lister is cheerful on the outside, but his mind yammers with worry. Why did Crane take Rimmer off with her alone? She'd better not be plotting anything. If she's plotting something, he'll kill her. No, wait, she's already dead. He'll switch her off, that's what he'll do. If he can figure out how.

The communicator at O'Connor's hip buzzes, and she lifts it briefly to examine the screen. Pearly whites show in a wide smile as she reads the message.

'Alright, you two, we can head up to the bridge now. Seems like our Captain and your friend are all finished chewing over old times,' she says, doing an about-face and beckoning them to follow her.

'They don't _share_ any old times,' Lister protests. 'He doesn't even _know_ her.'

O'Connor raises her eyebrow as they enter the lift. 'Oh yes? Never mind. Our Captain has charms to recall any memory, no matter how deeply buried.'

'Charms? Go to buggery, he's not interested, I'm tellin' ya. He never met her. He doesn't know her. He didn't know her. He doesn't _want_ to know her. He's with someone else,' Lister says.

The eyebrow arches again, barely perceptible fine blonde hairs against pale skin. 'Are you sure about that?'

'Of course I'm sure!' _How could I not be sure,_ he adds silently, _when it's me that he's with?_

The lift stops and O'Connor leads them the few steps more to the bridge. 'Well, hold to your beliefs as you will, technician, but you may find you're in for a bit of a shock.'

They enter the Drive Room. Rimmer is there, standing beside Crane, who has one hand locked around his wrist. Barker, the doctor, and McGruder are both there as well, McGruder feigning work at one of the stations, head bent so her hair obscures her face, Barker merely standing by, an expression of disinterest on his face.

'Rimmer, man, we'd better head off, not wear out our welcome or anythin',' Lister says.

Rimmer's head turns to him and Rimmer's lips move, but though Rimmer's voice comes out Lister would swear it's not Rimmer's words. He has an H stuck to his forehead, but something tells Lister it's not a real, hologrammatic one.

'I don't want to come back Lister. I want to stay here.'

Lister snorts out a little laugh that's more fear than the intended bravado. 'Here? Don't be daft man, the second they switch to soft-light for some reason you'll cark it. Come back to _Starbug_, come on, the girls will be gettin' worried.'

'I don't care about them. I only care about Nirvana.'

The Cat lets out a little _whish_ of breath that's probably meant to be the start of the word _what_, but Lister can't speak at all. Cat does it for him.

'What are you talkin' about, smeghead, you gotta come back!'

'He's not going anywhere,' Crane says. 'He's staying here. Didn't you hear him? He only cares about me.'

'But... but man, I love you.' Lister has found his voice again.

'Oh, so _you're_ his mystery partner,' O'Connor says. 'Shame, that. Off you go.' She nods to McGruder, who casually reaches out and taps a button on the console beside hers. Mid-protest, Lister and the Cat vanish.

'It was high time we dispensed with _that_ boring old shit,' Crane says. 'Come on, my love, to our quarters. You'll soon forget all about that grotty man.' As an aside, she adds to Barker: 'Are you sure that patch will work properly?'

'Yes, of course.' Barker has an irritated, clipped accent; it makes even his terms of endearment sound impatient. 'Get O'Connor to check it if you don't believe me, but a real brain is just as good as a hologram's for the patching. It's all in the electrical impulses.'

'You just became boring,' Crane tells him. 'Yvonne?'

'Yes, 'Vana?'

'Take Barker back to your quarters and shag him, or something. O'Connor, you go with them, if you like. Someone call the next shift up here, first, and get the engines going. We need to get out of here.' She smiles. It's not at all the smile she used on the old Rimmer; it's a predatory shark's grin. 'Arnie and I have some old business to attend to.'


	5. New Enemies

JayVee sort of wishes that Lister would shut his guitar up, but he's alone, his lover taken from him, so she figures it's kinda permissible in this case.

It's been two hours since the two boys came back and the _Enlightenment_ started moving, and it's been one hour and fifty-nine minutes since Lister started playing his guitar in that melancholy, lonely way. It's been one hour and fifty-seven minutes since Krissie asked him what was wrong, and it's been one hour and fifty-four minutes and forty-two seconds since he finished explaining that Rimmer's left.

Nobody knows the tune he's currently playing. Not that it matters what he's playing in this state of mind. He could be playing Bach or Mozart or Motorhead and it would all sound the same.

Kochanski is patiently trying to reestablish the communications link with the _Enlightenment_. JayVee's sitting on the scanner table with her book, but not reading it. She's watching Lister, who is sitting in a corner of the midsection, picking at the guitar strings, looking somewhat like someone JayVee should be offering money to. He just needs to put his hat on the floor in front of him. As for the others, she's not sure where they are.

The Cat makes this last statement at least partially untrue by coming down the stairs, taking them one at a time instead of helter-skelter the way he often does. He comes over to JayVee and touches her stomach, which is still flat under a tiny black top. With it, she's wearing a black skirt and long rainbow-striped socks. Gone are the flowery-patterned skirts she wore when she first came aboard -- fleeing from the Tank without much luggage, she'd resorted to stuff she hadn't worn in years, but now she has had time to reorganise her wardrobe to her own liking. With the socks she wears come-fuck-me boots. They're more or less all she owns in the way of footwear.

'You're really pregnant?'

'Yes, actually I am. Kryten did an ultrasound earlier today, and I'm pregnant.' JayVee covers his hand with hers and smiles shakily. 'It'll be okay.'

'But... a whole litter? You're too small to carry a whole litter!'

JayVee laughs, understanding the source of some of his concern. 'Oh no. In this case, I'm lucky to be human. My DNA's not the same as yours, so it's only one baby. Don't worry about that.'

Relieved of that concern, the Cat looks over to Lister. 'Is Monkey-boy all right?'

'Cat, he's been sitting there for two hours. Do you _think_ he's all right?' JayVee says, rolling her eyes and getting down off the scanner table.

'I don't know.'

'You silly Cat. Come on.' JayVee tugs at his hand insistently, leading him back towards the stairs and their sleeping quarters. An animal need has awoken inside her at the sight of him being so concerned and paternal. 'Let's ease some of this tension.'

* * *

She's right about the tension. It's thick in the air, thickest in the cockpit, where Kochanski patiently runs through millions of possible frequencies, searching for the one that will contact the _Enlightenment_, bypassing their blocking.

This isn't her area of expertise, so it's extra pleasing when it actually works.

The visual link clears first, but it's rapidly followed by the audio, and so Kochanski both sees and hears the woman who responds to the message, _Enlightenment, please respond..._

'_Enlightenment_, CMO O'Connor speaking. Who is that?'

But for a moment Kochanski can't answer, because she recognises the face on the screen. Long-ago memories burst to the surface of her mind: holding hands nervously on the first day of school with the girl she sees before her, both of them so much younger then. The long years of friendship. Living in the flat in Glasgow together, Erin trying to wean her off the alcohol. Walking home from the flat the night she discovered that her mother had cancer, twelve miles, three of them barefoot and limping after her ankle kept turning in the high heels. Turning in surprise at the funeral, less than a month later, to see Erin sliding into the pew beside her, arms out for a hug, her face forgiving and sad and hopeful all at once.

'Erin?'

The roundish face under the blonde hair -- no longer in little-girl ringlets but straight and professional - registers nothing for a moment, and then recognition dawns. 'Krissie?'

'Erin, what on Earth are you doing over there?' Kochanski's slightly baffled, but realises of course it's possible for Erin to be on the _Enlightenment_. Their ways split years ago, around age twenty-two... when Kochanski had been assigned to _Red Dwarf_ and had had to leave Erin behind, the blonde still finishing her course at medical school.

'Wondering how you managed to contact this ship,' O'Connor says, her tone cold. 'There's no point in trying. The Captain always gets her own way. Believe me, Kris, it's true... you're not going to get your friend back. You might as well forget about him.'

'We can't. We won't. Rimmer is Dave's lover, Erin. You don't let go of a lover so easily,' Kochanski says.

O'Connor's tone softens a little. 'Krissie... we had our friendship. But I can't help you now. I'm sorry. I can tell you what the Captain did... she did a mind patch, of Rimmer's memories from when he was here the first time, into his head now. He's coping with two sets of conflicting memories, and Nirvana's encouraging him -- no, ordering him -- to believe that his relationship with Lister's nothing but a fever dream or something.'

'How can she do that? And how is he going to survive? You're all holograms. If you switch the ship to soft light, he'll die,' Kochanski says.

O'Connor bows her head. 'We've got a section that's always hard light, just a small one, but enough to keep him safe... for now. Kris... as soon as she's bent him to her will, she's going to record his memory anew... and then kill him.'


	6. New Friends

Lister, hearing Kochanski talking into the microphone, musters the effort to get up and go into the cockpit, catching the last few words of O'Connor's last sentence. His heart freezes up for a second, then keeps beating, but it feels cold.

'No.' His tongue is thick and dry in his mouth, and he has trouble talking. 'No, you can't kill him. I need him.'

O'Connor squints at the screen in an effort to see who's talking. 'Lister? I'm sorry, but it's not going to happen.'

Lister takes the microphone from Kochanski. His movements, his expression, everything suggest calmness... except for his eyes. Their wounded brown depths alone give away the true emotions lurking just under the surface of that caramel skin. 'What's your name? How do you know Kris?'

'Erin O'Connor, CMO of this ship. Krissie and I met in school. Lister, Nirvana's determined. You're going to have to give up on getting him back.

'Bullshit. She's kidnapped him and I want him back. I'm not taking no for an answer, O'Connor. You don't understand -- he's not the same Arnold Rimmer that she knew. He's my... my boyfriend... and I love him. She can't have him. He doesn't even know her.' Lister feels like he's trying to explain the Lise Yates conundrum over again. 'Please tell her, O'Connor, she's breakin' my heart if she takes him. Let her record his memories if she wants to, but just give him back to me.'

O'Connor chews on her lower lip for a minute. 'Look Lister, _I_ understand and accept what you're saying, but she won't,' she says finally. 'Put it this way... she wants _her_ to be the only one with any version of him. She doesn't want to share, even if there _are_ two of him. Basically, Nirvana's gone insane. It started back when they first were parted and has been escalating for years. She discovered emotions again and they've changed her completely.'

'What d'you mean, "discovered emotions"?' Lister asks.

'I mean that she's broken the first basic protocol of the holo-ships: to forsake emotion and be dedicated only to your work.' O'Connor sighs. 'I'll admit I've broken it as well, and Yvonne, and James, and a lot of others are now as well. But you've got to realise that Nirvana's not using them properly. She let love consume her, make her desperate, and now she's lost her marbles. I was on her side at the beginning, completely, I totally understood how love could make her rebel against the Captain. I helped her switch him and the others off.'

'You _helped_ her? Erin! How could you?' Kochanski asks. 'Isn't it part of your basic training as a doctor to first do no harm?' O'Connor lowers her head and says nothing. 'Why on Earth would you abandon that?'

'I loved her,' O'Connor says softly. 'I loved her the way she loved -- loves -- Arnold. With a kind of fever. Oh, back in the early days, just after Arnold left, she gave me some of her time, and it was precious. Then she left me for Yvonne... and finally, she gave up all others and bent her will on regaining the one she'd loved and lost.'

'Oh, Erin.' Kochanski sighs. 'You know how it feels to lose someone. Can't you help us?'

And all in a moment O'Connor realises she can. She sees the slightly sulky expression on Krissie's face, the tilt of her head baring the smooth line of her throat, and maybe this isn't entirely innocent, but she wants to do whatever Krissie wants. She wants to make her happy. Years of friendship well up and overwhelm the conditioning drilled into her by Captain Platini and his crew, bring back that flickering spark of emotions she first began to feel again with Nirvana, and she opens her mouth and says, 'Of course I'll help you, what can I do?' without even thinking about it.

Kochanski smiles and laughs. 'Great! We need you to make sure that you don't get out of range of our radio. Can we keep this link open, or is it too risky?'

'It's risky, but Nirvana probably won't check. I think she's... she might be... anyway, she's not here,' O'Connor says, loath to admit that she knows exactly where Nirvana's gone, and it's the bedroom, and the look in the Captain's eyes had announced that they wouldn't be coming out for quite some time.

'Well, I'll contact you again on this frequency if I need to talk to you. Can you do anything about slowing the ship down?'

'Possibly,' O'Connor allows, 'but it'll be risky. On the other hand, the engineers know I'm friends with Nirvana, and if I say she told me to give the order they'll listen to me, even though I'm not their overseer.'

'Can you stop her?' Lister butts in, pushing in beside Kochanski at the microphone. 'Can you make her give Rimmer back?' His eyes are frightened.

'I don't think I can do that, Lister. I can try, but... well, she's been set on this for so long, I don't know if my saying anything will make any difference.'

Lister steps away from the mic with a sob and a sigh, and hurries out of the cockpit. O'Connor shakes her head, seeing him go, and Kochanski lets out a breath she didn't even realise she was holding.

'I'll update you soon,' O'Connor says.

'Okay. I'll see what I can do on my end.'

They share a brief smile, and then the communication is cut.


	7. New Goals

'Why couldn't she just record Rimmer's memory, patch together her own version of him, and create that?' Lister asks, managing to think clearly.

'Like Erin said,' Kochanski says, 'Nirvana wants him all to herself. She doesn't want to share. Also, correct me if I'm wrong Kryten, but isn't there a catch to the holotechnology in that you have to present evidence to the computer of the person's death?'

'You're right, ma'am,' Kryten says. 'The rule was introduced when the holotechnology first came into use on Mars, due to the Government's worries about overcrowding. If people had a live version and a hologrammatic version of themselves, the population of the planet would double, and they were already worried about the damage they were doing to the terraformed environment.'

Lister bangs the wall with a fist. 'We've got to get onto that ship and get him off.'

'With respect, sir, it's almost impossible. As soon as they sensed infiltration, they would switch to soft-light and you would all die,' Kryten says.

A single tear rolls down Lister's cheek. 'I can't leave him there, Krytie. I can't leave him there to be manhandled and killed by that... that...' He's unable to come up with a suitable epithet for Crane, however, and instead punches the wall again. Kochanski grabs his wrist and leads him back into the midsection, sitting him down at the scanner table and beginning to talk to him softly, while Kryten checks the autopilot settings, ever aware that technology is not infallible.

* * *

Something is happening to him.

Rimmer struggles to open his eyes, but there's a hand lying over them, keeping them shut. He tries to move his arms, but that's not happening either -- something cold is around each of his wrists. Handcuffs? Has Lister turned kinky on him?

'Listy?'

'No, my love.' It's a woman's voice, and as the hand is lifted from his eyes Rimmer opens them and sees Crane sitting beside him on the bed, wearing only a black silky negligee. Rimmer surveys his own body and sees that he's completely naked, and has a semi-hardon. Crane reaches down and touches him there, and his body responds the only way it knows how.

'What....'

'Sssh. It's all right. Soon you and I will be together forever.'

Part of his mind's telling him this is excellent. Another part, however, isn't so sure.

'But Lister?'

'Quiet.' Then Crane's mouth stops wasting its time talking and she nuzzles her lips against his cock, teasing him with light touches of her tongue until finally a pleading moan is torn from his throat and she relents and takes him into her mouth.

Coming from a group who live by a rule stating they must have sex at least twice a day, Crane is by definition very experienced. She can adjust to any new partner within minutes, be they male or female, and sense everything about them. Therefore, she knows exactly when to stop so she won't bring Rimmer to climax too quickly and spoil all her fun.

Rimmer's eyes are screwed shut and his hips are bucking in futile little movements, his cock desperately seeking the warmth of her mouth again. Crane straddles him and slowly impales herself, giving him something better.

No 'Geronimo' this time. Rimmer's only vocalisation for a good five minutes is a series of moans and whimpers as Crane works her art on him. Then, as she teasingly pulls away so he is almost completely out of her, his eyes snap open.

'Please... fuck me...'

Crane teases him a moment longer, squeezing her muscles tight around him (lots of practice at that too, oh yes), then in one swift movement takes him all the way in. The loud cry that is torn from his throat is almost enough to make her come. She does it again, and he thrashes his head from side to side, the cuffs rattling against the bedposts, and starts the hip-bucking thing again, striving to be deeper inside her.

Despite her best efforts, he's still not very experienced, and it only takes a minute or two more before his head lolls back and he takes in a great gushing gasp of air, and his pelvis slams up against her, his orgasm spilling out in three strong pulses.

Pushing her hair back from her face, Crane drops one hand down to between her own legs and starts almost absently touching herself. Rimmer's eyes are fixed on this, and the dazed look on his face is just enough to push her over the edge. He cries out anew as her climax ripples through both their bodies.

Sated -- for now -- and spent, Crane rolls off him and rests her head on his chest.

'Nirvana, my love?'

'Yes, Arnie?'

'Could you possibly take these cuffs off now, before I cramp up?'

'Of course,' Crane says, thinking _What a pest. At least holograms don't cramp up_.

And resolves to kill him as soon as she's rerecorded his memories.

* * *

Meanwhile, several floors away, on the other side of the long tunnel that separates the sleeping quarters and science labs from the engineering bays and Drive Room, O'Connor sits in her office just off the bridge and drums her fingers on her desk. The beginnings of a plan are forming in her mind, but she already knows she can't do it alone.

Opportunity knocks at her door.

'Who is it?' O'Connor calls, pushing a button on her desk that unlocks the door. 'Come in.'

McGruder eases through the door, a stricken expression on her face. 'O'Connor, you're not going to like this, but I'm gonna pull rank on you. You're under orders as of now.'

A thousand thoughts stream through O'Connor's head: that the radio link has been discovered is the first of them. 'Orders, First Officer?'

'Yes. I know you're devoted to our Captain, but I'm going to ask you to ignore that. We have to save Rimmer from her, before she kills him, and return him to his own ship. I'm taking over from her. She's clearly insane.' McGruder folds her arms. 'And if you don't cooperate, I'll be forced to throw you in the Brig alongside her... or just have you switched off.'

O'Connor looks at her incredulously for a long minute, then begins to laugh.

'What? Do you find the idea of being switched off _funny_?'

'No,' O'Connor chokes, 'but c'mere till I show you something you're gonna love. I have some people here you're gonna want to talk to...'


	8. New Hopes

Shayne lies on her bed, dreaming a dream she can't quite get away from, and somehow doesn't want to. Her face twitches, and occasional little moans escape her slightly parted lips, but she's not dreaming about anything so nice as sleeping with Krissie.

Her earache has been partially alleviated by the medication, but it's more the memories of past earaches, from her childhood, that hurt. She remembers screaming in pain more than once, before she started learning how to ignore pain and silently fight back against it, whether it is natural or inflicted by someone else.

But when she's debilitated by this pain, she can't fight so easily against her memories, and so the nightmare continues.

* * *

Kochanski comes to the cockpit at Kryten's call, vaguely surprised that Erin is calling back so soon. Lister beats her in there, showing great enthusiasm for the first time in the past twenty minutes since the last radio call ended.

Waiting on screen with O'Connor, McGruder looks selfconscious but determined.

'Lister, Kochanski, are you there?' Both of them nod and say yes into the microphone. There's a thump from the other end of the link, indicating that even the _Enlightenment_'s advanced technology is fallible. 'Bloody visuals... ah.' The First Officer smiles. 'Lister, I'm going to help you.'

'Oh, thank God.' Lister sags back against the nearest console, and Kochanski realises he was worried that McGruder had more bad news. 'How?'

'We're not a hundred percent decided on a plan yet, but we'll cook something up pretty soon. I just wanted you to know that a few people on this crew are sick of Nirvana's domineering ways, and I should be able to gather up a pretty decent team to run a trial,' McGruder says.

'A _trial_? Why not just switch her off?' Lister asks, clearly longing to be the one to do the switching.

'We can't,' O'Connor says. 'She reprogrammed the projection unit to block any use of it regarding her personal data without a password. I'm going to start running possible passwords soon, but I'm afraid she'll realise what's going on.'

'That's where I'm going to, er, 'come in', as it were,' McGruder says, blushing a little. 'I'm going in to distract Nirvana from paying any attention to the outside world.'

Kochanski giggles, while Lister looks faintly sick at the thought of not one, but _two_ women playing around with his Rimmer. 'You'd just better watch yourself,' he says.

'Don't worry Lister, I know what you're thinking, and I'll be reversing the mind patch on Rimmer as soon as we've got Nirvana under control,' O'Connor reassures him. Lister looks vaguely mollified, but not much.

'Well, that's great, Erin. Call us as soon as you've got something concrete.' Kochanski watches the two women leave the room, then says to Lister, 'I'm going upstairs and checking on Shayne. Will you be all right?'

Lister looks considerably better. 'Yeah, I will, go.' He sits down in his seat and looks out of the cockpit window at the _Enlightenment_. Kochanski watches him for a minute, then turns and leaves.

* * *

Shayne is still twitching in her sleep when Kochanski enters their bedroom. The sweat on Shayne's forehead is further testament to the bad dreams she is suffering. Her tough-girl image is foiled somewhat by this, and by the lump of cotton wool sticking out of her ear.

Kochanski pulls up a chair and sits beside the bed, not intending to wake her lover, but Shayne's eyes open anyway. She grins on seeing Kochanski and reaches up, grabbing a handful of Kochanski's hair and dragging her close. It doesn't seem to matter how sick she is, Shayne still has quite an appetite for kissing.

'How are you feeling?' Kochanski asks when Shayne finally lets her go.

Shayne grunts. 'Not bad I s'pose, but I'm gonna need a shower.'

'Were you dreaming?'

'Yeah. I dunno, bad stuff, nothin' I can really explain,' Shayne adds, correctly divining Kochanski's next question. 'Just stuff from th' past. An' my ear's killin' me, but I'll live.'

'That's my girl. Careful you don't get water in your ear, that won't help. Are you sure you don't know what you were dreaming about?'

Shayne sighs. 'Ya not gonna give up, are ya?'

'Shayne, I do give a shit.'

Shayne sighs again. 'Okay. When I was just a kid, maybe fourteen, fifteen, I was abducted.'

Kochanski's eyes show her scepticism. 'By aliens?'

Shayne laughs this time. 'No. By this bunch o' religious idiots, th' Sword of Jesus or somethin'. I guess I should call it kidnappin', but th' newspapers didn'. Anyway, th' reason they took me was 'cause they heard some rumour 'bout me bein' a dyke. An' they hated dykes. They wanted t' 'fix' them all.

'They took me t' a farmhouse out in th' boonies, so far as Earth had boonies left by then, an' I was there with a buncha other gays -- or that's what th' Sword said we were, anyway. So far as I could tell only 'bout two o' the ten o' us really had any inclinations t'wards the same sex, an' I wasn't sure 'bout myself.

'We'd been there 'bout a week when I got an earache, like this one I got now. I needed medication for it. I was screamin' for hours, but I got jack shit. Th' Sword people just kept on with th' "treatment", so they called it, for our "condition".'

'What sort of treatment?' Kochanski asks, not wanting to know, wanting to know, wanting to close her ears, wanting to hear anyway.

'Lots o' Bible readin' -- I knew th' bloody book back an' forth just about anyway, but I knew it even better after that -- an' "sexual orientation reinforcement".' Shayne makes the quotation marks in the air with her fingers. 'Meanin' if we were female, they gave us loads o' _Playgirl_ magazines -- an' one o' the male Swords would come to us in the night, once or twice a week, an'... make sure we got horny over guys.'

Kochanski shivers. 'Fuck, Shayne, how did you get away?'

Shayne looks away for a minute, then looks back, her hand tightening on Kochanski's. 'Killed 'em. Th' guy who came in th' night plus two guards. When the rest saw what I'd done they pissed off, quick smart. I led th' others out, boys and girls, an' we found the spaceship they brought us in an' went home.'

'How long were you there for?'

'Four months.' Shayne sighs. 'S'prised I didn' lose my faith in religion, but there ya go. People's minds ain't always easy to follow.'

Kochanski squeezes her hand back. 'Don't worry, Shayne. Nothing bad's going to happen to you here.'

'Damn straight it's not, Krissie. Damn straight.' Shayne sits up, wincing slightly, and touches the cotton wool in her ear, then leans forward and kisses her girlfriend again. 'I got too many hopes built up this time 'round, and I ain't gonna see them broken.'


	9. New Irregularities

Crane is drowsing when the door to her room opens, and she remembers she forgot to lock it before indulging herself with Arnie. She half-heartedly gropes for a sheet and pulls it over herself, before focusing on the intruder and realising it's McGruder.

''Von, what're you doing in here?'

McGruder's face lights up with a smirk at the sight of the Captain so dishevelled. 'You forgot to lock your door.'

'So?'

'Have you had sex with him yet?' McGruder nods downwards at the slumbering form of Rimmer. The fake H is missing from his head, fallen off at some point during his and Crane's activities.

'Of course,' Crane says impatiently. 'Just the once, mind you, he passed out. I'm gonna give him a little bit longer, then wake him back up.'

'Just the once? Captain, as your First Officer, it's my duty to enforce ship's regs, and I should remind you the rules say it's _twice_ a day.' McGruder grins wider. 'And I haven't even done it once. And he did father my child, after all.' McGruder's son, Michael, has been missing in action for years and years, but this doesn't stop her claiming him as a reason to get some Rimmer-lovin'. 'Mind if I join you?'

Crane looks at her for a long moment, perhaps trying to decide her sincerity, perhaps just trying to decide if she will or won't. Then she nods, and McGruder locks the door, coming to join the pair on the bed.

* * *

As Kochanski makes her way back down towards the midsection, she passes Cat and JayVee's room, and hears the sound of a thump, a muted yelp of pain, and a feminine giggle. She half-grins to herself -- sounds like she shouldn't disturb them for a while.

Kryten is working in the galley, tidying the cupboards. He raises the bit of plastic above his eye that passes for an eyebrow, and Kochanski shrugs. 'She'll be fine.'

'Excellent, ma'am.'

Kochanski goes through to the cockpit. Lister is still sitting in the pilot's seat, staring at the glow of the autopilot light.

'I never thought I'd fall in love with him,' he says without looking up. 'I never thought I'd fall in love with a bloke at all, let alone Rimmer... but something made it happen, and now I can't just let him go.' He sighs. 'I've been tryin' to think of something else to do to get him out of there... not that I don't trust McGruder and your friend, but I wish I could do something meself. It just doesn't feel right to be sitting aside doing nothing when he's stuck in there with that... that...' Unable to come up with a suitable epithet for Crane, he gives up.

'I know what you mean,' Kochanski says, sitting down in the Cat's seat. She immediately bounces back up with a look of disgust on her face, then spots the juice box stuck down the side of the seat and sighs with relief. Ruefully, she wipes the apple-smelling mess off her backside with a handy rag, then wipes the seat. She hears a snicker and smiles to herself -- so maybe Dave's not all that far gone after all.

'All clean?'

'Oh, hush.' Kochanski re-seats herself. 'As I was saying, I know what you mean -- I never thought of myself as being attracted to girls, not even when I was younger and potentially confused, but it's different with Shayne. I don't know if I'd ever want to be with a _different_ woman. I think it might just be her.'

'I'll second that,' Lister says. 'I could definitely never see myself with the Cat.'

'What about Kryten?'

'Don't be disgusting.'

Kochanski finishes her giggle and nods. 'Yuck. But I think the Cat's pretty well as straight as they come. I couldn't imagine him with anyone who wasn't female, apart from himself that is.' She is surprised at herself -- usually she considers the topic of sex to be taboo, outside of the bedroom, but sometimes it's nice to share.

'D'you think Rimmer's having fun over there?' Lister sounds pensive.

'Probably. Come on,' Kochanski adds, seeing his pained wince, 'you would have fun if two beautiful women were jumping your bones. And besides, he won't remember it anyway.'

'We can only hope,' Lister says.

Kochanski reaches over and pats his shoulder reassuringly. 'Don't worry about it. Everything will work out in the end.'

* * *

Rimmer's eyes are just about out on stalks, partly from being disturbed from his post-coital unconsciousness, mostly because McGruder and Crane are crouched over him like predatory animals, their mouths alternating on his cock, their tongues working him expertly. His hands are cuffed again -- seems like Crane likes her control a lot.

If he closes his eyes, he can see someone else in his mind's eye, though, and for some reason the mental image is far more enthralling than the two women. Talented as they may be, he half-wishes that it was just one slightly inexperienced mouth tantalising him.

A shift in weight on the mattress announces that one or both of them is moving, and Rimmer opens his eyes to see Crane leaning over him, her lips pinkly wet, as she leans in to kiss him. As soon as her mouth is on his, the balance shifts again, and the breath is almost sucked from his lungs as Crane gasps. Rimmer can't see past her head, but suspects that McGruder has found an alternative use for her mouth.

Crane rolls away from him to lie on her back, McGruder's head between her thighs, devouring her. While Crane's eyes are shut as she reaches orgasm and writhes and moans, McGruder lifts her head for a moment and winks at Rimmer. Rimmer can't quite comprehend this, but doesn't think about it for much longer, as the sight of the two of them together has brought him too close to the edge. He rattles his chains, desperate to free a hand and relieve himself, and McGruder takes pity on him; reaching over, she gives his cock three short, hard strokes and Rimmer comes violently all over the place.

'Don't worry Arnie, next time you can join in,' Crane giggles, grabbing McGruder and pulling her up the bed to lie next to Rimmer. Covered in sweat and less decent bodily fluids, the trio relax... for the time being.

* * *

Shayne wakes from another fitful nap and pulls the cotton wool out of her ear. It is soaked with blood.


	10. New Jinxes

Kochanski and Lister's conversation has continued, luckily for the Scouser without any knowledge of what's happening aboard the _Enlightenment_. Lister is drinking more lager, and has become even more melancholy.

'You know what I'd miss most? The cuddling,' he announces suddenly.

'The cuddling... oh. Yeah, I guess I'd miss that a lot too,' Kochanski says. 'But I'd miss waking up in the morning next to someone I loved.'

'What would you do if you were me?' Lister says. 'If that was Shayne on that ship? If you thought you might not get her back?'

Kochanski considers this carefully for a short while, looking out at the endless field of stars outside the window. 'I'd go in fighting,' she says finally. 'At least, I think I would.'

Lister grins. 'If your mate doesn't call in the next few minutes, I might have to go in. Go in a spacesuit, make sure Rimmer's in their hardlight section, and switch the rest of the ship to soft.'

'God.' This makes Kochanski think of something. 'Do you think that we'll be able to bring Erin over here? Once Crane's been switched off, there's not much left for her over there. I talked to her earlier and she said she didn't think much of the rest of the crew.'

'You know, I don't know if the hologram generator's working here. We never tried it.' Lister, momentarily motivated, gets up and goes to the console just outside the cockpit door. 'We can activate one of the non-human holograms... they have templates for rabbits and stuff like that for running trials.'

Madonna, JayVee's cat, is sitting on the scanner table licking one of her paws clean, and watches with interest as Lister boots up the hologram generator. She bristles slightly at the buzzing noise it makes. Just for fun, Kochanski reaches past Lister and chooses the 'feline' template. According to the stats, if the hologram works, it will be of a small tabby housecat.

The image of the cat comes into view in the middle of the floor, and Madonna hisses in surprise, then pounces. She falls straight through it and barely keeps her feet. Kochanski laughs, but then taps the console. 'It's not working properly.' The screen is frozen. 'It stops halfway through the process. All we get is an image that can't do anything.'

Lister shrugs. 'So, maybe Erin has her own light bee.'

'Maybe. We can worry about that when we're done worrying about Rimmer.' Kochanski touches his elbow, turning him back towards the cockpit. 'Get in there and make sure everything's okay. I need to eat.'

'Yes, ma'am.' Lister salutes and goes up the steps. Kochanski goes into the galley, which Kryten has vanished from, and starts looking in the fridge for something that isn't chilled trainers.

* * *

JayVee, sucking on an ice cube fresh from her glass of cola, swallows it by accident and feels the silvery glance of cold go straight to her head. She and the Cat have just entered their room. Cat is watching her drink the cola, a generic, JMC grey brand. Well, he's probably watching her sucking on the ice cube and thinking about her sucking on something else, but he _is_ watching her. He has a thoughtful expression on his face.

'Thinking?' Jayv's long given up asking him the whole question. One word is enough.

'I was just wonderin' something about Monkey-boy and Smeghead,' the Cat says evasively.

'Like what?' JayVee finishes her drink, puts the glass down, and waits. Today she is in a short black skirt that's doing all kinds of delicious things to Cat's libido, and a black singlet top.

Cat comes closer and whispers in her ear, as if he's afraid to say it out loud, like as if someone's going to hear them, closeted in their room. JayVee listens, then nods thoughtfully.

'Go raid Dave's room. We're gonna need some of their lube.'

JayVee is nothing if not completely blunt. The Cat possibly goes red, it's hard to tell with his dark complexion, and scuttles out of the room. JayVee looks at her empty glass, then opens the cupboard and finds her secret stash of alcohol.

She may need to be slightly drunk this time.

* * *

Not much later, after a bout of rough foreplay that leaves a bruise on the Cat's forehead and a fanged bite mark on JayVee's thigh, she is sprawled facedown on the double bunk, wondering just how she let herself be talked into this, as Cat's slim finger gently coaxes the muscles of her anus to relax.

'Curiosity killed the Cat, you know,' Jayv mumbles into the pillow.

'What?'

'Never mind.'

She feels the slightly warm slip of the lube on her skin, Cat's finger opening her up, messy and smeary, and then his finger's gone and his cock's there instead, his body heavy on her back as he tentatively pushes into her, slowly, trying not to hurt her. The strange new sensation is compounded by the fact that for the first time they've slept together, the tight gloss of latex is between him and her... but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Owowow. It's pain like the ice cube's coldness, sharp and bitter but over in a few seconds. God, it feels strange, but somehow... it kind of feels okay. One of Cat's hands pins hers above her head, the other slides under her and pinches a nipple lightly. JayVee yelps and bucks up against him, and his hand darts down between her legs. To concentrate on this, he's stopped moving inside her, but as soon as his fingers find her clitoris and he's satisfied by the whimpering noises she's making, he starts moving again.

This is so weird. JayVee wonders the same thing the Cat was wondering before, except from the other perspective. He was wondering about Lister and Rimmer in bed, about how it felt for them, and now she's wondering if it feels the same for her as it does for them. _Probably not, Jayv old girl,_ she decides. _Little thing called the prostate... ooh_. The Cat has just changed rhythm, bucking into her with shorter, harder thrusts, and it feels... well, her word wouldn't be _good_, exactly, but _different_, and his hand is doing just the right thing between her legs, and...

It's hard to tell if it's him yowling or her, but chances are it's both of them.

* * *

It's been, oh, _forever_ since the _Enlightenment_ stole Rimmer away from the ship. Cat and JayVee are back down in the cockpit with the others -- in fact, the only ones missing, aside from Rimmer obviously, are Shayne and Kryten. Shayne's still upstairs in bed, everyone would assume, and perhaps Kryten's upstairs cleaning.

He isn't, actually. In fact, he and Shayne are both in the medi-bay. Shayne is lying with her head in a space-age piece of medical apparatus that's analysing the possible reasons why her ear has started bleeding. Kryten is running the machine, his plastic brow wrinkled as he looks at the readouts.

'Is it anythin' nasty, Kryten?' Shayne asks, her voice muffled by the headgear.

'I don't know yet, Miss Shayne, we will have to wait for the results to come through.' Kryten presses a button and lifts the helmet off Shayne's head.

'I'm gonna go lie back down, Kryte, I don' feel all that great.' Shayne touches her ear, which Kryten has put some ear drops in. 'Thanks for fixin' my ear up.'

'Welcome, Miss Shayne.'

As Shayne disappears out of the medical unit, bound back to her bedroom, Kryten studies the printed results. He's not trained to interpret them, however, and sits down at a computer, beginning to feed the results into the programme that will hopefully tell them all.


	11. New Keepers

Rimmer lies on the bed. His eyes are closed, and he is breathing in slow, flat inhalations and exhalations. One would assume that he is asleep, except that his pose on the bed suggests a certain alertness.

He has been aboard the _Enlightenment_ for a little over five hours. During this time he has been given a mind patch, has been shagged senseless by not one but two women, and has had very little sleep. His body and mind are both exhausted.

Unlike the last time another mind was patched into his, this time the failure comes a little slower, perhaps because of the higher compatibility: it is, after all, only a variant of his own mind. So when it begins to fail, he can sense it. It's almost as if a part of his mind is tearing away and falling off. It uncovers the memories of Lister, blocked by Crane, and Rimmer almost cries out in pain as he thinks of the pain he has caused his lover. But he makes no sound, wary of Crane and McGruder, lying either side of him like bizarre naked bodyguards.

Falling away, the memory of his past with Crane, the stranger memories of an entire past he never lived. He almost misses them as they go -- after all, better to be a dead hologram in space than to be just dead. But then he forgets what he has forgotten, and knows no better.

Cracking one eyelid open, Rimmer peeks at the two women. They are exhausted -- after the things they have been doing this afternoon, he is hardly surprised. He sits up slowly, easing out from between them, and slides to the foot of the bed. They still haven't woken. He stands up and creeps to the door - still no movement from the bed.

His clothes lie near the door, flung there by Crane in a fit of passion. Rimmer picks them up, pulls his briefs on, then whispers 'Unlock' to the door, which obligingly opens. He steps out into the corridor and orders the door to close and lock. Then he turns to find somewhere to dress.

'Arnold Rimmer?'

A tall blonde woman who reminds him vaguely of JayVee is standing there, arms folded, looking amused. Rimmer thinks of going back into Crane's room, but vaguely recognises this woman as one who was in the Drive Room earlier. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

'Rimmer, get dressed and come with me. You'll be safe in my office.'

'Who are you?' Rimmer's blanked on her name, if he ever knew it.

'I'm CMO O'Connor. I'm a friend of Kochanski's. Hurry up before Crane wakes up. We're gonna get you out of here.'

'But...' Rimmer gestures helplessly at the closed door.

'McGruder's got it under control. Now come on!' Rimmer is still only wearing his briefs, and he starts to pull his shirt on, buttoning it slowly, dreamily. O'Connor hurries forward and makes him lift his feet, one at a time, stuffing them into the legs of his trousers. She yanks the black material up, her knuckles brushing against his groin, and mumbles an apology that he barely notices.

Carrying his shoes in one hand and his socks in the other, O'Connor leads the barefoot Rimmer at a run in the direction of the Drive Room.

* * *

Shayne and Kochanski actually have books on the bookshelves in their room. They've pooled the few books they had in their cells, and scrounged more from around _Starbug_, and hunted down more from the few derelicts _Starbug_ has stopped at over the past months.

It's a strange collection. _American Psycho_ by Bret Easton Ellis leans against Shayne's battered old Bible. The sixth _Harry Potter_ book is beside Chuck Palahnuik's _Fight Club_. There are books by authors neither woman ever heard of before. But everything is a viable distraction these days.

Lister offered to let them have his _Pop-up Kama Sutra_, and Shayne regrets the hasty way in which Kochanski declined it. There's an annoying shortage of that sort of reading material in space for some reason.

Shayne barely has to look at the shelves to find her Bible. She takes it down and it falls open at Psalm 23. _The Lord is my shepherd..._

For years Shayne has attempted to reconcile her religion with her sexuality and found it impossible. She knows the location of every slur against homosexuality in the book. This Bible has been hers since childhood, and she still reads a little from it every Sunday, to remind herself of the past. A past that, save for this small link, she has more or less escaped.

But now the past is returning again. Insidious reminders of the times before _Red Dwarf_ creeping up slowly. Back before her and JayVee, back before the Brig, back before Krissie and the rest of this crew, who Shayne has found a place for in her hard little heart. She has always been a tough nut to crack, but as she sits on her bunk, eyes fixed on the page but not reading, her mouth moving silently around the words she has long memorised, she looks ready to cry, ready to break down, and more than anything else, utterly terrified.

* * *

Kochanski comes running upstairs a few minutes later to find Shayne and tell her the good news about Rimmer -- he has been freed, is with Erin now, and the mind patch has failed - and finds her sitting there like that, no longer looking at the book, but looking at the blank wall now, imagining who knows what scene.

'Shayne? Are you all right?'

'I think so, Krissie,' Shayne says, shaking herself out of her reverie. 'What's th' matter?'

Kochanski tells her what's been happening, her eyes fixed on Shayne's face the whole time, trying to fathom what's going on behind her girlfriend's eyes. For the life of her she can't work it out, but sees the Bible open on Shayne's lap and knows something is not quite right.

'So are you all right?' she asks again after her explanation. 'You look pale.'

Shayne nods slightly. 'The earache. But it's almost gone. Kryten's just checkin' things out. Just in case.'

'Just in case of what?' Kochanski's voice holds a hint of the fear, the fear Shayne managed to wipe from her face when she heard her girlfriend in the corridor. 'Just in case of _what_, Kerry?'

At the sound of her first name, Shayne tries to smile, but unexpectedly, has to hold herself back from crying. That name means the past to her, the time when she was soft and kind instead of hard and merciless. Before. 'Just in case it's somethin' that needs medicine an' not just a little lie down, Krissie. Don' panic.'

Kochanski nods, and drops to her knees by the bed, taking Shayne's hands in hers. 'Just let me know when you find out, okay?' she asks, kissing the backs of Shayne's hands. 'Let me know what you find out.'

'Anythin' for you, Kris,' Shayne promises. 'Anythin'.'

And she sounds so fervently sincere that Kochanski wonders again what is going on behind those secretive blue eyes.


	12. New Loves

Back in the cockpit.

As Kochanski has been thinking, O'Connor wants to know if there is a place for her on board _Starbug_. She wants to know if there is a place for McGruder as well. And Kochanski has to tell her that there isn't, that the hologram generator doesn't work and they don't have any light bees.

O'Connor accepts this with the equanimity Kochanski remembers from their shared childhood. She was always the calm one, holding Kochanski's head while she vomited, keeping her dyed hair from getting dirty. Erin was always the one doing things for her, and now she can't do this one little thing in return. She feels bad in a vague sort of way, but wondering about Shayne is what her mind is more focused on, and all she's really interested in from her hologrammatic friend is getting Rimmer back to make Lister happy so she can focus on her own lover.

'I'm really sorry, Erin.'

O'Connor nods. 'Sorry is fine. I can handle sorry. Get your backside over here and take this boy home before Her Nibs wakes up and 'Von can't handle her.'

'Why don't you just switch her off?' Lister suggests, looking all weepy at the thought of Rimmer coming home. 'Shut her down?'

'It's not so easy as that. We need three senior officers from a small group of approved officers to sign off on the programme, and one of them's in bed with her and Barker's having sex and Crane's the other one anyway. I need 'Von and Barker, and to _get_ 'Von and Barker I need you to get this dopey bastard off my ship! So will you get your arse into gear right now, Kristine? I'm not gonna ask again.'

Kochanski hears the voice of her past telling her to go home and see her mother, and smiles at O'Connor, flipping two fingers at the camera, and O'Connor flips her right back and they both laugh. It's not all that funny, not if you know Kochanski's past, but it is as well.

'Okay, Dave. Suit up. I'm coming with you. We need to bring an extra breather, in case the ship goes soft-light. Kryten, keep the outer airlock door open as well. Cat, I need you at the controls, be ready to fly us out of here the second we're back in the airlock with the door shut. Jayv, navigate. Shayne, weapons. If they fire on you, don't hesitate to counter. In the event of a problem, your first priority is yourselves.' Kochanski is pulling her space suit on as she says this and ignores any protests. 'And if I come back in here and one of you hasn't done what they're told, I'll have you court-martialled.'

'Yes, ma'am.' JayVee salutes, diffusing a little of the tension of the situation. Kochanski laughs. Just.

'We'll be back soon.'

* * *

The space-walk over to the _Enlightenment_ is mostly uneventful, except for the slight trouble they have opening the airlock of the hologrammatic craft. But the wheel turns at last and Kochanski senses that O'Connor has just managed to override some programming or other that keeps the airlocks closed.

They are a strange sight, bobbing through the corridors of the beautiful clear ship encased in their unwieldy suits. Fortunately, inasmuch as there is night and day in Deep Space, it is nighttime, and so few of the holograms are up and about, the rest choosing the nighttime hours to fulfil their daily quota of sexual activity. The one or two people that Lister and Kochanski _do_ see tip them a wink and keep going - evidently collaborators of some kind against Crane.

The Drive Room is deserted except for O'Connor and Rimmer, hovering in the doorway of O'Connor's office. Lister cries out with delight at the sight of his lover and recklessly yanks off his helmet, throwing himself at Rimmer, sprinkling kisses all over his face.

Rimmer kisses him back, a little uncertain, but growing more sure all the time. It's like falling in love again, starting over from the start or something.

O'Connor and Kochanski look on, amused. Kochanski dares to remove her own helmet and speaks. 'Cute, isn't it?'

'More than cute,' O'Connor quips. 'Videotape this and I wouldn't need to worry about finding a partner every day.' Kochanski tries to bat the thought from her mind of watching Lister and Rimmer in bed together and fails miserably. It's one to discuss with Shayne when she gets back to _Starbug_.

'Respect, Erin.'

'Right, Krissie.'

Kochanski grins at her childhood best friend. 'Did I tell you I've got a girlfriend?'

O'Connor claps her hands softly. 'That's great, Krissie. Never figured you for that type, but that's great.' She giggles at Krissie's look of mock outrage. 'Well...'

'Yeah. Yeah. Look...' Kochanski doesn't know how to bring it up. 'I'm sorry you can't come with us.'

'It's okay. As soon as I can get 'Von and Barker we'll go and do some selective erasing anyway.' O'Connor smiles, a little sadly. 'It's not nice, switching people off. It's like euthanasia. But you get used to it.'

Kochanski nods, and thinks she could never get used to it no matter how hard she tried.

And then the door slams open. Crane is standing there, steely-eyed, her arms folded. McGruder, wrapped in a sheet, is on her knees beside Crane, Crane's hand knotted into a fist in McGruder's hair. It looks like Crane has dragged McGruder all the way here, and McGruder's face is streaked with tears. Rimmer cries out at the sight, and Lister steps determinedly between the two in the doorway and his lover, short stocky body providing an inadequate barrier.

'Well, well, O'Connor,' Crane sneers. 'Having a party, are we?'


	13. New Musings

'Well, well, O'Connor,' Crane sneers. 'Having a party, are we?'

'Fuck off, Crane,' O'Connor says evenly. 'You got your lay, now let him go. The mind patch has failed, anyway. You're going to have to live with it -- you're not the only one who can have him.'

'Aren't I?' Crane yanks on McGruder's hair, and McGruder yelps in pain -- she can't help it. 'First Officer McGruder, activate the soft-light remote. _Now_.'

McGruder raises her hand as slowly as she can, holding a tiny black box. She looks at the three living humans, Lister and Kochanski scrambling to get their helmets back on, Rimmer looking terrified as Lister rams the mouthpiece of the extra breather into his mouth. Oxygen alone isn't enough to survive in the vacuum of space, and Rimmer knows it. McGruder is stalling for time, and Crane impatiently snatches the remote from her hand.

'Say goodbye, kids.'

'Goodbye, Crane,' Lister says, impassive.

'Don't do this, Nirvana,' Rimmer says.

'Why not? If I do, I can live forever without missing you. You won't give me what I want, so...' Crane notices O'Connor muttering into the radio. 'What do you think you're doing?' She doesn't wait for a reply, but with the hand not holding the remote grabs a rad-gun from the rack on the wall and puts a round through the radio, which explodes.

'Now you're denying us the chance to say goodbye to our crewmates,' Kochanski says, shaking her head. 'Crane, listen to reason...'

'What would you know about reason? You're _alive_!' Crane shouts. 'The dead have no _reason_ to listen to _reason_ from the living. Why would we listen to the sort of people usually responsible for our deaths? Why would we bother?' She drops the gun on the floor. 'After death, we need no reason. We're as good as immortal, holograms.' Her voice becomes calm, coaxing. 'You can all join my crew, Arnie. You can all be holograms, how's that? I'll erase McGruder, O'Connor, Barker... don't look at me like that, Yvonne, I know you three plot things behind my back. I didn't get to be Captain by being stupid.'

McGruder has her head twisted on an awkward angle just to give Crane dirty looks. 'No, you got to be Captain by killing people,' she says.

'Shut up!' Crane knees her in the face and McGruder's head snaps backwards.

'Wait! I agree with you!' She sounds desperate. 'Give me the remote and I'll prove it. I'll kill... it's for you, 'Vana...'

Crane looks down at her. 'Do you think I'm a complete fool?'

McGruder smiles through the hologrammatic blood pouring from her nose. 'No. Give me the remote. You can't use it anyway -- it's keyed to my thumbprint.'

Crane nods, then hands her the remote. McGruder holds it up, grinning at the Dwarfers. 'I'll--'

The sound of running footsteps echoes up the corridor, and everything stops.

Barker enters the room, grey hair dishevelled, distinguished face torn by the struggle for breath. He is wearing only a towel, knotted around his waist -- and carrying a similar remote to the one McGruder holds.

'I heard there was going to be a switch,' he says.

'I don't know _how_ you heard,' Crane snaps, glaring at O'Connor, who looks innocent. 'But yes. McGruder, get on with it.' She seems to have dismissed the thought of Rimmer from her mind -- proof positive that her once-fine brain has degenerated into something insane.'

'Okay,' McGruder says, and pushes the button.

* * *

Back on _Starbug_, Kryten is beginning to get anxious. Mr. Lister and Miss Kochanski have been gone for an awfully long time. The Cat's hands are tense on the pilot's yoke - Monkey-boy and Bud-babe shouldn't be taking so long. JayVee squints through the front bubble, wondering if the figures she can faintly see moving inside the clear skin of the _Enlightenment_ are anyone she knows.

Shayne, sitting in the midsection, stares down at the cigarette she holds between shaking fingers and suddenly, viciously, stabs it into the ashtray. Her finger contacts the red-hot end and she's burned before she can yank her hand back. Cursing, she gets up and runs the tap, semi-warm recyc water cooling the place.

She usually only smokes when she's stressed - in the Brig, she smoked a lot because of stress and because of her image. Never a great one for image, Kerry Lee Shayne, but the tough-girl one she kind of likes.

Ignoring image now, she sits back down against the wall, knees drawn up almost to her chest, and opens her Bible.

* * *

And instead of the ship becoming soft-light and Lister, Kochanski and Rimmer falling from it to their possible - and for Rimmer, almost certain -- death, Crane vanishes.

Kochanski, who has her mouth open and her helmet still only half on, snaps her mouth shut and stares at McGruder, who is picking herself up off the floor, clamping one hand to her nose, which is streaming with blood.

'What just happened?'

'We erased Crane,' Barker says, looking shaky. 'We had to have all three of us... bugger it, O'Connor, I thought you said it would be _after_ this lot got away.'

'I thought it _would_ be,' O'Connor says from behind her desk. 'I didn't think of Crane coming in... what happened, 'Von?'

'She jumped me,' McGruder says. 'She woke up, realised Arnold was gone, and grabbed my hair. She dragged me out of bed and up here before I could even get dressed, hence the sheet.' As she speaks she is searching for tissues. 'But she made one mistake -- she thought that remote was just for soft-light. I'd memorised the code for erasing her -- remember how often we'd talked about it, Erin? - and entered that instead. I just had to hope you two would click to it,' she adds, smirking.

'We're not _that _bloody thick,' Barker says. 'Here.' He hands her a wad of tissues, then starts trying to clean the blood off her hands and face.

Lister still doesn't quite get it. 'So... did you all have a remote thingy?'

'Yes,' O'Connor says. 'The requirement to erase someone of Crane's rank is three high-ranking officers, and since she was paranoid about being betrayed, she only let us three be that high a rank -- CMO or First Officer. It's lucky all this happened now, in a way, because like she said before, she was getting suspicious of us as well.'

'Why?' Rimmer. The first coherent thing he's said in some time.

'Well...' O'Connor looks vaguely embarrassed. 'We spent a lot of time in bed together, that's all.'

'And... you were just planning to overthrow her?' Lister asks.

All three of them look embarrassed now. 'Well. Most of the time,' says McGruder.

* * *

JayVee squints at the _Enlightenment_ again. 'Hey! I think I see them! They're at the airlock!' she says.

Shayne jumps up and runs into the cockpit.


	14. New Necessities

They are given a hero's welcome. Rimmer, still slightly pale-faced, his mind on too many thoughts at once; Lister, puffing and proud and with one hand possessively clamped around Rimmer's wrist; and Kochanski, who looks dazed, and after giving Shayne a kiss hello goes straight to the communications console and starts trying to reestablish the connection with the _Enlightenment_.

'I think Crane completely decimated the radio system with that shot... I can't get through,' she says.

'They'll try an' contact us, Krissie, don' worry,' Shayne says.

Outside the cockpit window, the _Enlightenment_ suddenly vanishes in a blue blur. Those who haven't seen it come and go before gasp. Rimmer looks at the place where it isn't a little mournfully. Lister catches the look and pats his arm.

'Rimmer, man, it'll be okay,' he says.

'Oh, I know. I just...' A tear snakes down Rimmer's cheek. 'Oh, Listy, how can you forgive me?'

Lister is semi-stunned. 'What for?'

'For sleeping with that woman... _those women_,' Rimmer amends. 'For letting myself be sucked in like that... I should have known better!'

'How could ya, man? You didn't even know her!'

'I've got all of his memories now, you know. Right up to the point where he left there last time. I know what you're going to say,' Rimmer says, holding up a hand as Lister begins to protest, 'the mind patch failed. It did. But before it did, and I could remember my own past again, all of _his_ past got into my mind. I've got a double past now. One dead, and one... well, dead. Then the patch failed, but because we were essentially the same person, I've retained all his memories anyway.' There is no need for anyone to ask who _he_ is -- the other version of Rimmer, of course.

Lister looks at Rimmer, one hand going up and stroking his cheek. The rest of the crew are quite fascinated. 'Man, it makes no difference. When you did what you did you were still under her influence. I accept that. Don't beat yourself up over it. I don't blame you.'

Rimmer relaxes, and Lister hugs him. Rimmer is a little tense in his arms.

'What's wrong, man?'

'I can't tell, but... I seem to have this bizarre memory of you trying to urinate on me from one of the landing gantries.' Rimmer shakes his head, and the rest of the crew crack up. 'Lucky I was only a hologram!'

The crew separate then, Lister and Rimmer staying in the cockpit to take over for their shift at the controls, Cat heading upstairs for a nap, JayVee getting Lister's guitar from the midsection and sitting in the copilot's seat to practice playing it.

As Shayne and Kochanski wander out of the cockpit, vaguely planning to go upstairs and rest after the excitement of the day, Kryten pulls Shayne aside.

'Miss Shayne, ma'am, those results should be ready for you,' he says, attempting to whisper.

Kochanski's head snaps up. 'The results are in? I'm coming with you,' she says.

'Kris, maybe ya better not...'

'I better not, fuck that. I'm coming with you.' Kochanski links her fingers through Shayne's, and Kryten leads the way up the stairs.

* * *

The medi-bay is always a sterile place on JMC ships. Very clean, very tidy, and very organised. Kryten had no problem working out which machines he needed to perform the scan on Shayne, and he has no problem now finding which printer the analysis has churned out of.

Looking at the papers here can sometimes be a death sentence discovered in a dot-matrix type. More than once in the past a JMC employee has been seated on the edge of one of the beds while their doctor reads out, in a dry tone that stays just the right side of becoming sadness, their negative prognosis.

Kochanski and Shayne sit on the edge of the bed, still holding hands, as Kryten reads the three pages that have come out of the printer. He wonders, as many people have done before him, why medical people and medical computers need so many words to make such a short diagnosis. He makes a pretence of reading very carefully so he doesn't have to say anything yet. He really reads carefully, in fact, wondering there's something he's missed, something that might mean this doesn't mean what he ultimately knows it does.

'Everything's fine.' He can't meet their eyes.

'Kryten, if you don't tell the truth, I'll have you dismantled and used as a Porta Potti,' Kochanski says almost pleasantly.

'Lie mode cancel,' Kryten whispers. 'Ma'ams... there is spotting on the temporal and occipital lobes.' Before either of them can ask, 'spotting of _what_?', as he knows they want to, he continues. 'It's a stage one carcinoma. It's cancer.'

He continues talking, speaking of the p53 gene and radiation, of smoking -- and here Shayne interrupts him.

'It's got nothin' to do with my smokin'. These are _herbal_ cigarettes, an' it's nothin' to do with them, all right?'

'Shayne, can't you understand what he's telling you?' Kochanski can hardly understand it herself. 'Kryten, what can we do?'

Kryten consults his notes. 'Well, ma'am, as I said it's only stage one, and that means it hasn't metastasised further than where it is. Miss Shayne, have you ever worked in Engineering?' Shayne nods, all the fight gone out of her. 'Then I strongly suspect that this is due to inefficient shielding. And I believe that it is treatable, by either chemotherapy or radiation.'

Kochanski barks out a laugh. 'That's fucking ironic, that is. That's just...' She bursts into tears and Shayne puts an arm around her, pulling her close, stroking her hair and holding her as she cries. She herself does not cry, but simply looks at Kryten in a way that makes him rather uncomfortable.

'What do I have to do?'

'I'll consult the computer and find the appropriate drugs for this condition,' Kryten mumbles, unnerved by her direct, unwavering gaze. 'We should be able to start a course of treatment tomorrow. I am confident that it is treatable,' he adds for Kochanski's benefit, not that she hears him.

'Good. Give us a minute, will you?' Kryten nods and leaves the room, and Shayne lifts Kochanski's head off her shoulder. 'Kris? Look at me.'

Kochanski's face is red and tear-sodden. 'Oh, Shayne. I can't... oh, at least I'll be here with you, not like Mum...' She bursts into tears again.

Shayne slaps her, none too lightly either. 'Stop it. Cryin' never helped anythin'. I'm not ya Mum, an' I'm not gonna die.' She certainly looks as if she might overcome death by sheer force of will. 'Now wipe ya face, an' don' cry again, there's no need for it. Ya shouldn' cry over th' past, an' ya don' _need_ t' cry over me, so stop it, okay?'

Kochanski stops crying, but occasional sniffles keep escaping her. 'Are we going to tell the others?'

'What d'ya think? Of course we're gonna tell them. Th' reason I got Kryten t' check on me was 'cause my ear started bleedin', an' I don' want anyone gettin' worried an' not knowin' what's going on.' Shayne the Indomitable. She drags Kochanski up off the hospital bed. 'Come on. Now.'


	15. New Optimists

'When did you ever work in Engineering?' Kochanski asks as Shayne drags her back down the corridor, banging on the Cat's bedroom door on the way.

'I'll tell ya when everyone can listen,' Shayne says briefly, unwilling to repeat everything for everyone who wants to hear. She lets out a sigh on the way down the stairs, something primeval from the bottom of her lungs, but Kochanski hesitates to ask why.

They make it downstairs, and Shayne probably makes her announcement -- the shocked look on JayVee's face filters into her mind, making her think _goodbye old friend, first friend_ \-- but the scent of Kochanski's perfume has somehow grabbed her attention. Never to smell that again, never to wake up in the middle of the night and watch her lover sleeping, never to kiss her... no, Shayne decides, she will not accept this.

It's the closest she's come to really crying in some time.

'So I'm gonna take whatever treatment Kryten can throw at me, an' kick this thing's arse. But I thought everyone should know,' she concludes.

JayVee, looking stricken, drops the Cat's hand and throws herself on Shayne, hugging her tightly. 'Oh, God, no,' she says, her voice choked.

Shayne remains resolute. 'It's gonna be okay, Jayv,' she says, hugging her friend back and stroking her hair. 'I promise.'

JayVee pulls free and looks her square in the eye. 'I'll be here for you, Shayne,' she says. 'Always. You've always put up with me being stupid and I can live with you being sick.'

Yes, Shayne understands. She has even lived with JayVee's infidelities. With Todhunter, of all people. Was it all that long after their own relationship had begun? That day in the cell... JayVee trying to explain the inexplicable...

* * *

'I'm trying to think of it as a lifestyle choice.' JayVee lies on her bunk and stares at the ceiling. Her bunkmate is at the table, crumbling potato chips between her fingers.

'And what sort o' lifestyle choice landed ya here with me in th' first place?' Shayne is twenty-four, and so far nobody she has met has placed her accent.

'Shayne, that's not fair. I'm sick of this cell, you know that -- I just want to get home.'

Shayne stops mutilating the chips and examines the cell. It's painted a drab grey, with a bunk bed two high, the blankets the same colour as the walls, the pillows stark white. JayVee is probably the brightest thing in the cell in her pink prison jumpsuit. The shower curtain is faded to almost transparent -- not that it matters, since unless they're confined to quarters they shower down the hall anyway, in the shower room, three times a week. The chemical toilet is dull polished metal - dull _and_ polished because it is clean, if not shiny -- and the toilet roll is almost finished. JayVee's blue toothbrush is sitting on the edge of the basin, next to her damp facewasher. Shayne's toothbrush is on the sill beneath the unbreakable mirror. There isn't much else in the cell, except for the table and two chairs, bolted in a no-nonsense way to the floor.

'I know ya wanna get outta here, Jayv. But sleepin' with him... how can ya? Ya meant to love me, not anyone else, least of all a bloody guy. For God's sake.' Shayne viciously flattens the last potato chip.

'It's the only way to get me -- to get _both_ of us -- out of this box. Don't you want your freedom? Don't you want to be outdoors again? You can take me to that zero-gee basketball stadium you mentioned on Miranda, with the great lawn out the back. You and me can really live out there. Don't you want that?'

'Get out. Take ya stuff an' get out. I don't wanna know what ya think. Fuck him if ya want, but ya not gonna get out, not after what ya did to him in the first place.' Shayne says this in a perfectly flat voice.

JayVee gets up, looking like she's been slapped, and runs out of the room. Shayne doesn't look at her. Shayne doesn't even pointedly look away from her. She just looks at the table, with the potato chips looking like the corpses after the Massacre of Spud Hill.

JayVee leaves.

A long silence fills the cell. Shayne sees the door sticking open, but makes no move to close it. A single tear forms at the corner of her eye and drips onto the crushed potato chips. Shayne has not cried since she was eight. She gave it up. But now, with the escape of this one tear, others follow, and finally Shayne gives in. She folds her arms on the table, drops her head onto them, and cries, the sound echoing off the grey walls of the lonely cell.

* * *

Shayne drags her mind back from the past. She knows that the past isn't worth worrying about -- once something's happened, it's happened, and there's not taking it back. What she has to worry about now is the present.

'Thanks, Jayv,' she says simply. 'For ya support. Kryten's gonna find me a cure an' it'll all be fine, ya know. It'll all be fine.'

JayVee smiles a watery smile. 'I hope so,' she says. She looks at Rimmer and Lister and giggles. 'I've got something to tell you.'

'Yeah?'

JayVee whispers in Shayne's ear, the others unable to hear, but judging by the expression appearing on Shayne's face the news -- if it is news -- is simultaneously repelling and amusing. JayVee finishes on a question, to which Shayne emphatically shakes her head.

'No?'

'No,' Shayne states. 'F' one thing, I got other alternatives if I'm with a bloke, an' I'm not male, so it's not my only option.' JayVee goes red as Kochanski works it out almost without thinking and lets rip with a snort of laughter. 'But whatever floats ya boat....'

'Shayne?'

'Yeah?'

'Boat sank. Rapidly. If it weren't for...' JayVee raises her hand, wiggles her fingers.

'Whoa, whoa,' Kochanski, red in the face, interrupts. 'Let's stop this right here before everyone finds out a lot more than they want to know, okay? I have just about got to go dip my eyes in sulphuric acid to sear the mental image from my retinas, so either end this _now_, Jayv, or you two go talk someplace far, far away where I don't have to think about it.' Her face is red from suppressed laughter, though, and she's smiling as she flaps a hand at them.

'Okay. Cockpit, Shayne?' JayVee asks. 'Unless Kryten needs you....'

'Not right now, I don' think,' Shayne says. 'Cockpit it is.' They go up the steps to the cockpit, Shayne kissing Kochanski and JayVee kissing the Cat on the way past.


	16. New Promises

Lister has quietly hidden his non-herbal cigarettes in his bedroom. He feels vaguely sick about them - whether Shayne's cancer has been caused by radiation or not, he still doesn't want to smoke them. But a brain tumour... it's one of those things that seems like it must be radiation-based, one of those insidious creeping diseases. He doesn't know if cigarettes can cause brain tumours or not, but either way he feels bad smoking around Shayne.

The cockpit door is still closed, Shayne and JayVee holding their palaver, occasional bursts of giggling coming from behind the door. Kochanski has vanished in there with them. Lister doesn't want to know, but he assumes they're not doing manicures or holding an impromptu hairdressing salon.

He runs his fingers through his own hair. It feels so strange -- he's been wearing it in a ponytail, reluctant to return to dreads after the effort everyone made to get it straight, and at the moment he has it loose. He remembers what he looked like when they were suffering the Despair Squid's hallucinations, and thinks he must look like that now, only a little less well-dressed. He remembers how stupid Rimmer looked - that boofy hair, his dreadful clothes -- and giggles.

'Something funny?'

'Yeah.' As Rimmer sits down next to him, Lister explains what he was thinking about. He thinks it's a shame that Rimmer won't remember some of the things that happened - anything that happened after they left the holoship, which means he won't remember some of the best times they had together. But maybe it's a good thing. They nearly died in there a few times. If Rimmer remembered all that in one go he'd probably go and hide under the bed for a month. Lister thinks he himself would go hide if everything came down on him at once like that.

'So is it weird having memories that aren't yours?' he asks.

'Of course it is. But the thing is, it's not like I have two memories for the same time. I was dead. There's not a lot to remember when you're dead,' Rimmer says. 'On the whole, I think I prefer _his_ life -- even the really horrible bits.' He shakes his head. 'Except for the part with 'Ace' Rimmer... God, how horrible.'

Lister snickers. 'Well, like I've said before... that's what _he_ became.'

'I'm glad I don't remember that,' Rimmer says quickly.

'It was awful,' Lister says.

'I can imagine.'

'No... I mean it was awful because he - you -- he was going away. Think about the time from _his_ life when we were marooned. I couldn't've made it through that without him, dogfood or not. I needed company, real company, and when he left to become Ace, all I had left was Cat and Kryters, at least until Kris showed up. it just wasn't the same. Don't you remember how pleased I was to see you when I finally got back to the _Dwarf_?' Lister asks.

'I thought it was a bit strange,' Rimmer says. 'But then, I didn't know at the time that you'd spent years and years with another version of me.'

'What was it like, being dead?' Lister says.

'I don't really remember. I don't think there was anything. I remember dying -- it hurt. Getting hit by a nuclear wind -- well, I don't need to tell you what radiation burns can be like. We've both seen them. And all I remember after that was... coming back. I got resurrected right where I'd died. Actually, since the skutters had swept all the dust into the corners, and even the nanobots had trouble sorting it out, I got resurrected in a compromising position with Todhunter.' Rimmer shudders at the thought. 'Fortunately he dropped me pretty quickly, and it wasn't like my legs were fused around his neck or anything.'

Lister tries not to think about this.

'Anyway, having _his_ memories has given me a slightly different perspective... I've just got to remember not to try and walk through things,' Rimmer adds. 'But it hasn't changed anything I feel for you. If anything, it's made it stronger.'

'Made it stronger, how?'

Rimmer regards him with a vaguely amused look. 'Oh, didn't you know? _He_ was in love with you, too.'

* * *

The girly gab-fest in the cockpit shows no sign of winding down. If there's one topic on which this particular trio can discourse for hours, it's sex. And with JayVee's lurid tales, many involving bondage and domination (not to mention the sado-masochism), they're set for hours of talking, squealing, and giggling.

Even Shayne is squealing with hysterics at times, and this is surprising: not because of the so-recent news of her illness, but because back in the Brig she would not be caught dead squealing. Discussing sex, yes; _Kalifornia_ was not the only film watched in that cell, and certainly not the highest-rated, and the guards could be persuaded to look the other way for porn screenings just as easily as for anything else. But the bouts of hysterical laughter she comes out with now are definitely not part of the old Kerry Shayne.

'You know, Shayne, I think Kris has calmed you down a bit,' says JayVee in a lull in the laughter. 'You never used to laugh like this, unless it was at someone.'

Shayne blushes and looks guilty. 'Well... th' thing is, I think ya right,' she says. Eventually. The words being dragged out of her very, very slowly.

'Sexcellent,' JayVee says, and they all start giggling again.

'Remember when we watched that video in our cell, and I asked ya who ya liked better out of me an' Jayv?' Kochanski nods. 'Did ya really think about it then, or did ya not really like th' idea?'

'I have to honestly say, Shayne, I didn't give it much thought at the time,' Kochanski says.

'And now?' Shayne gives her a funny look.

'Don't be stupid. Who do you _think_? Really, you're silly sometimes,' Kochanski says, hugging her.

'Just checking,' Shayne says. 'Are ya _sure _ya love me?'

'Shayne, I promise, I love you. No matter what.'

There is a long, solemn pause, and then they return to their conversation, JayVee navigating, Shayne steering - with her feet -- and Kochanski sitting on the console behind Shayne, giving her lover a shoulder massage. Whatever doubts Shayne had, they seem to have been dispelled.


	17. New Quandaries

Lister opens and closes his mouth a few times. A response still doesn't come out. Rimmer stands up and begins gathering the empty coffee cups from the scanner table, wanders over to the galley, and starts rinsing them in the sink.

'Look at this. Kryten's obviously not cleaning properly. There's mould in the plughole. Tut, tut.' Rimmer clicks his tongue. '_And_ the salad cream's back in the cupboard again. Who keeps putting it there?' He moves the bottle into the fridge. 'We're running low on coffee. I think JayVee's been drinking more than usual. I know _I_ would if I was sleeping with the Cat. He seems to have the sex drive of a horny Albanian goat. Assuming that a horny Albanian goat has a high sex drive of course. Funny how the herbal tea bags never get used... oh, some of them are missing. I think Shayne drinks herbal tea. Either that or Kris is using them on her eyelids... are you listening to me?'

Lister manages to unhinge his jaw and goes, 'Gah.'

'You're a great conversationalist, you know that?'

'In _love_ with me? Huh?' Lister forms some semblance of coherence. 'How did you know he was in love with me?'

'Oh, _that_,' Rimmer says, trying not to laugh. 'It started when you threw him that deathday party and gave him your memory as a present. So, it turned out really bad, but he was touched by it -- and it gave his mind a nudge in a whole new direction.' He smirks. 'You were probably lucky he didn't jump you while he had the Cat's body when you all body swapped.'

Lister tries not to think about this either. He has overheard enough of JayVee's conversations to know... ouch. Still, whatever she wants...

'I hope he doesn't come back,' Rimmer says, looking quite worried for a moment. 'What if he comes back to this dimension somehow and decides he wants to stay?'

'Oh, _please_,' Lister says. He has to reach up a little to hook his arms around Rimmer's neck when he joins him in the galley, but he reaches. 'I'm in love with you, man, if he came back I'd let him know it for sure. Especially if he came back expectin' me to be waiting for him.' A pang of heartache, as he recalls two memories this Rimmer does not have: saying goodbye to 'Ace', and the moment when he first became hardlight, and the first thing that he'd touched was Lister. 'But I don't think it's gonna happen.'

'You don't think he'll get back to here?' The hope and relief is solid in Rimmer's tone.

'Not in this universe,' Lister says confidently.

* * *

JayVee is the first to exit the cockpit when the three girls decide they've talked long enough -- about half an hour after Rimmer's bout of uncertainty. She heads straight for the fridge, kneels down, scrounges right to the back of the bottom shelf, and unearths a Pepsi can. The _pop-fizz_ as she opens it gets Lister's attention -- he thinks it's his lager - and he asks her, 'Where did that come from?'

'Derelict,' JayVee says succinctly. 'Caffeine is God's gift to astros.'

Shayne, next out of the front, takes a friendly swing at her head. 'Don' take th' Lord's name in vain, Jayv,' she says. She looks mellow, relaxed. _Seems like a good girly goss is God's gift to the unwell_, Lister thinks. Kochanski bounces down the steps behind her and kisses the side of her neck. _Either that or they've been having a threesome in there. That would make anyone mellow out_. He tries to erase the thought from his mind -- it reminds him uncomfortably of certain porno mag centrefolds from his adolescence -- and simultaneously will his erection down. Neither works. Well, it's nice to know that he can still fantasise about women.

'So have you been drinking all the coffee?' he asks JayVee, remembering the low stocks.

JayVee shrugs. 'Some, but not as much as it looks like is gone. Weird. Does anyone else drink coffee?'

'I do, some,' Rimmer pipes up, 'but surely two people can't have gone through that much. That jar was full a week ago, and now two-thirds of it is gone. Even if you've been craving it and sprinkling it on icecream or something' -- JayVee jumps and looks vaguely guilty - 'there wouldn't be that much gone.'

'It's the mystery of the missing coffee. We need the Famous Five to come and investigate it,' Kochanski says, giggling.

Several blank looks greet this comment. 'The who?' Lister asks.

Kochanski groans. 'You have _no_ idea?'

This potential discussion on famous literary characters is forestalled by the arrival of the Cat from upstairs. He bounds down the stairs, in fine form as usual, wearing one of his brightest pink suits and a smile twice as wide as his face. JayVee reaches a hand out to him, expecting him to take it and whirl her into his arms, but surprisingly, the feline bypasses her completely and dives headfirst into the fridge, hunting for something good to eat.

'Yeeeoow! Hey, monkey, how come there's no decent food? Where's the Krispies?' he demands.

'You ate them off my stomach last week,' JayVee too-much-informations to another groan from Kochanski.

The Cat gives her a blank look, then shrugs and heads straight past her into the cockpit. 'Guys, nobody's steering? Don't you _care_ about the most valuable thing on the ship getting damaged if we hit an asteroid?'

'What, the baby?' JayVee says, smiling.

'No. Why'd I care about some kid? I'm talkin' about me, bud-babe!'

JayVee's mouth hangs open and she stares into the cockpit in shock. 'What did you say?' she manages to say at last. But the Cat ignores her, drumming his perfectly manicured nails on the steering yoke as he stares straight ahead into space.

'What's goin' on with _him_?' Shayne asks as JayVee's face crumples and she bolts upstairs, closely followed by Kochanski. Shayne looks at Lister and Rimmer and sees only her own expression: complete bafflement.

'We'd better find Kryten,' Lister says. 'He might know what's wrong.'


	18. New Roles

'Jayv, whoa whoa whoa. Settle down.' Kochanski catches JayVee at the head of the stairs, literally - her arms clasp around the blonde and hold her close. JayVee is sobbing and shaking. 'You _know_ the Cat. There's no way he meant what he said. Something's going on.'

'Is something amiss, Miss Kochanski?' Kryten asks, coming down the corridor with a feather duster.

'I'll say!' JayVee says angrily. 'The Cat's lost his mind!' She looks ready to launch into a diatribe against the feline, but Kochanski shushes her.

'The Cat was acting strangely when he came down from his nap,' she says to Kryten, who nods. 'He said something nasty to JayVee.'

'_And_ completely snobbed me off,' JayVee adds. 'So rude! Men!' But she has stopped crying, save for the occasional hard sob, and shakes her head, her hair brushing against Kochanski's face.

'Everything will be okay. Kryte, go downstairs and see if you can figure anything out. Everyone else is down there,' Kochanski says. 'I'll just calm JayVee down.' Kryten nods again and passes them, his feet clanging on the stairs.

Kochanski leads JayVee into the Cat's room. She hasn't been in there often, but it looks the same as usual - suits, clothes everywhere around the room, the double bed rumpled, and CDs out of their cases beside the CD player, looted from some derelict or other. A small heap of coffee is spilt on the floor beside the bunk -- maybe that explains the coffee conundrum.

JayVee sits on the edge of the bed and tissues fiercely at her face, wiping off her tears and a bit of her makeup. They haven't found many cosmetic items on the ships -- the simple fact is that more men than women are astros -- and Kochanski remembers her joy on receiving the small box of makeup from Lister, back when he gave her that red dress. She tries to remember if she packed the dress and makeup when they escaped, but can't recall. She hardly uses it, but JayVee seems to like the routine of putting on eyeliner and mascara.

'Now I look like a raccoon,' JayVee says.

'Of course not,' Kochanski says automatically. 'You're gorgeous. The Cat _must_ be mad if he wouldn't give you a second look before.'

'_Second_? He didn't make it to _first_!' JayVee says. She gets up and leans on the edge of the basin to remascara her lashes, dust a little blush on her cheeks.

'Whatever's wrong with him, Kryten will work it out,' Kochanski says. When she first met him she thought he was a moron, but she's come to realise that he's not. In fact, his long years alone have afforded him time to learn a lot -- even if they sent him slightly mad -- and she often consults him before making important decisions about the ship.

Except for navigating. That's her territory.

And Shayne.

'Sure, I'll bet,' JayVee says obligingly. She has faith in the droid as well. 'You wouldn't have any lipstick, would you? Mine's gone erk.'

'Sorry, I'm not sure if I brought it with me. I don't use it much,' Kochanski says. 'I can have a look, if you'd like.' She dashes down the hall to her own room, and manages to find the little makeup case with relative ease.

'You're a lifesaver,' JayVee tells her.

'What, small, round, with a hole in the middle?'

'Maybe without the 'round' part.' JayVee hisses in pain as she moves the waxy red stuff over her lips. 'Ouch.'

'What's the matter?'

'Ut ip,' JayVee says, mouth open, but Kochanski can see the problem -- a little trickle of blood running down JayVee's chin. Her lip is split, near the corner of her mouth, and Kochanski holds a tissue to it. Her eyes meet JayVee's for a long moment, and that night when Shayne asked her who she'd prefer comes back to her. Staring from one to the other, noticing hair, eyes, Shayne's pouty lower lip, JayVee's soulful gaze, so many things in such a little time. For that moment, Kochanski wonders whether, in a parallel universe, she might have ended up with this woman instead.

So many dimensions branch from this one moment. In one, Kochanski kisses JayVee; in another, it's JayVee who makes the first move. In yet another, the exact reason for the Cat's behaviour literally jumps up and bites them.

But in this dimension, 'It'll be fine if you don't poke at it,' Kochanski says, stepping back. The bloodied tissue flutters to the floor, landing next to a small scatter of coffee grains. 'Maybe you'd better not put the lippy on.'

'Maybe.' JayVee turns back to the mirror, fussing over her hair now. It's amusing how she's become so careful of her appearance, probably from living with the Cat for all this time. She tugs at a strand of hair and pouts. 'Look at this. It's so greasy. There's no shampoo anywhere,' she grizzles.

Kochanski, who has to hide her shampoo to keep it from the Cat, knows that JayVee is only slightly exaggerating. However, when there is a choice between food and hair supplies on a derelict, the food has to take precedence. There's no point looking pretty if you starve to death -- the Cat doesn't agree, but he is the lone dissenter.

'Next derelict we come to, we'll definitely do something about it, okay?' Kochanski looks at JayVee. 'Are you going to be all right?'

'As soon as Kryten figures this out. You go on back down, okay? I'll be right with you.' JayVee smiles professionally and flaps a hand at Kochanski, who nods and leaves the room.

The second Kochanski is out of hearing range, JayVee drops onto the bunk, burying her face in her hands. She holds her tears back for a moment, but then they come pouring out, beyond her control. Her shoulders shake with emotion. Through all her youth, her adolescence, she faced rejection time and time again, but it has never hurt as much as today. Bitter rage convulses her face and she snaps her head back to howl.

The howl never escapes her throat, though. Something is in front of her, something misshapen and grotesque. JayVee's cry is trapped in her lungs as it grabs her with malformed claws and yanks her close as if to kiss her. But where people have lips, it has a long, strange sucker, which slaps against her forehead. JayVee's eyes roll back in their sockets and she crumples sideways, and the beast moves with her, even as she falls to the floor.

She lands where the spilled coffee grains no longer lie.

The polymorph completes its meal.


	19. New Surrealities

Kochanski goes back to her own room to put the makeup box back, making a mental note to bring it back out sometime when JayVee is less likely to cry it all off, but is barely to the head of the stairs when Shayne, appearing in front of her as if by magic, grabs her arm wordlessly and tows her back to their room.

'Shayne, is everything all right with the Cat?' Kochanski asks, and Shayne stills her words with a kiss. But it's not just a peck on the lips; Shayne is going all out to impress. In fact, the air of desperation to the gesture makes Kochanski wonder if everything _isn't_, in fact, all right with the Cat.

Drawing back, Shayne nods. 'Yeah, th' Cat's fine. Kryten thinks what did it was a polymorph, but nobody will tell me what th' hell a polymorph is.'

A kind of cold dread seizes Kochanski, making her shiver. She remembers her universe, her crew's encounters with the shapeshifting beast. The nerveracking suspense of creeping through the cargo decks, bazookoids at the ready, jumping at every shadow that might be the monster. And how they first discovered its presence on board, when she and Dave went to wake the Cat for breakfast and the usually impeccable feline was a cowering mess in the corner. It had sucked his arrogance from him, his overweening self-confidence, and left him a fearful, quavering coward. Luckily, their Kryten had recognised the situation for what it was, and they had been able to deal with the creature, but not before Kochanski herself had lost her fear to it. She smiles now, remembering; it had been fun for a time, feeling no fear, madly chasing after the thing to destroy it without her earlier feelings of terror.

'A polymorph?' she repeats stupidly.

Shayne nods. 'Do ya know what th' hell is it?' she says.

'Yes. It's a shapeshifter and it feeds off emotions. Jayv -- she's alone. We've got to group up, stick together, or it can pick us off one by one.' Kochanski starts for the door, but Shayne's hand on her arm stops her. 'What?'

'Can it wait, just a minute? I thought I saw Jayv leave the room after ya, goin' downstairs,' Shayne says. She looks a little sad. 'We haven' really talked about... ya know... me -- what we found out, an' all.'

Kochanski feels like the worst girlfriend ever. 'Well, if you saw Jayv going to the others... God, Shayne, I feel like such a bitch.'

'Not a bitch,' Shayne says, hugging her. 'Never.'

They sit down on the bunk, and Kochanski makes a 'go ahead' gesture with one hand. 'What did you want to say?'

'Kryten came down for th' Cat an' told me that maybe there ain't enough stuff for th' chemo. An' th' radiation machine ain't workin' very well.' Shayne takes a deep breath. 'Th' thing is, Krissie, we don' know if it's gonna be enough. T' kill th' cancer, I mean.'

'I knew what you meant,' Kochanski says automatically, before the full meaning of it hits her and she gasps. 'You're not saying -- no, Shayne, you can't _die_.'

Shayne bows her head. 'If it's not there, then it's not there.'

'No -- we'll turn around -- find _Red Dwarf_ \-- Shayne, you _can't_.' Kochanski bats at the tears on her cheeks, like pesky flies. 'Shayne--' And fails to remove them as she breaks down entirely. She feels Shayne's arms go around her, rocking her, but can't hold back the tears. 'No, no, no,' she hears herself saying.

'I didn't think you'd be this upset,' Shayne says, sounding faintly amused. Kochanski rockets her head back, looking at her with puzzled eyes.

'Shayne -- you're _smiling_.'

'Of course.'

And Kochanski shrieks as Shayne's face collapses in on itself, the too-familiar alien sucker protruding out and slapping wetly against Kochanski's forehead. She feels the draining sensation as if her brain has had a plug pulled out of it, and screams again, hitting out at the disgusting creature. That it should take on the face of _her_ Shayne, _her_ lover...

The polymorph feeds on her revulsion and her tears, growing fat on her emotions. It clings to her, slick arms pinning her arms to her sides. When the footsteps of the others, drawn by her cries, approach, it seems to sense them and releases her. Blinded by the tears in her eyes and the revolting slime that coats the shapeshifter, she does not see what shape it assumes, but knows only that it is gone.

And then the sensation flows back into her mind. She can think again. She is calm, a smile playing on her lips. She wipes the tears from her face, wondering how they came to be there, when she feels so at peace. She turns to face the door as the others come running, all of them, with that ethereal smile on her face. Only angels look this heavenly. She greets them when they come to her.

* * *

Lister sits down heavily in the pilot's chair. Rimmer stands behind him, hands resting on Lister's shoulders. They have sidled into the cockpit for a moment's peace, but have left the door open, just in case of shapeshifting monsters.

'So we have JayVee, who can't be upset, despite the fact that the Cat's turned into... er... pretty much the way he was back at the beginning of everything, and we have Kochanski thinking she's the Great Mother Goddess, or something,' Lister sums up. Through the open door they can hear Kochanski offering to hold hands and hum to draw the polymorph to them. It's not exactly inspiring.

'We have you and me and Kryten. And Shayne. And if Shayne can't kick arse on this thing, then it can't be done,' Rimmer says.

Lister gives him an amused look. 'We managed all right when we had to,' he says. 'In fact, the second time... you wouldn't remember, but you tackled it and held it down so I could freeze it.'

Rimmer makes a face. 'Eurgh. I'd rather not get that close to it, thank you. What did you freeze it with?'

'Liquid dillinium. Whatever that is. Kryten recommended it. It's... freezy stuff.'

Rimmer rolls his eyes affectionately. 'You gimp. So do we have any on board, or did we unluck out and get the _Starbug_ without the convenient monster repellent?'

'Unfortunately, we don't have any on board.'

'We don't have any on board,' Rimmer repeats. 'What _do_ we have, then?'

Lister counts on his fingers. 'Three bazookoids, one which has an empty power-pack. A radiation pistol, fused onto the Light setting. And a few tins of peas nobody will eat.' He sees Rimmer's expression. 'Come on, you could knock someone out with those.'

'"Someone", yes. "A seven foot killing machine", no. Anything else?'

'How about this?' Shayne asks, coming into the cockpit, carrying something red. 'I found it jammed into a locker in th' galley.' She exhibits her find.

Lister immediately groans. It takes Rimmer a second longer to remember the object, even though he knew it before the accident, but when he recognises it, his voice joins Lister's.

'Oh...'

'...God.'

'Howdy doodly doo!' the toaster chirrups. 'Anyone want any toast?'

Lister and Rimmer both move to bang their heads gently against the console and end up whacking them together, which is much more painful.

'How the _smeg_ did he get 'ere?' Lister says, rubbing his head.

'Ya know this toaster?' Shayne asks, puzzled. 'Man, ya got some strange friends.'

'We've never met,' the toaster says. 'Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Talkie Toaster™ (patent applied for), Generation Two, designed to toast up to four bready products at once. Would anyone like any toast?'

'Second generation toaster,' Lister says, gibberishly.

'Yes,' Rimmer agrees. 'Four slots. Handy, if you like toast. Not so good if you like sanity.'

Shayne looks down at the toaster. 'Is it insane?'

'I most certainly am _not_,' says the toaster. 'I'm Talkie Toaster™...'

'We got that the first time,' Lister says. Looking more closely at the toaster, he can see that it is different to his toaster. The four bread slots instead of two, for example. And no mains plug. Batteries, then? Although he wouldn't put it past the thing to have developed a way to run on sheer insanity. His toaster or not, he now trusts nothing with artificial intelligence. Except for Kryten, of course, but Kryten hardly deserves to be lowered to the same level as the toaster. 'But what use are you?'

'I can make toast,' the toaster offers.

'Shayne, put it back in the cupboard. On second thought, flush it out of the waste disposal unit.'

Shayne stands uncertainly with the toaster in her hands, indecision plain on her face. Maybe it's this emotion - if this is an emotion -- that draws the polymorph from its hiding place, or it's something else, but there is a distinct squelch from behind her.

'Look out!' Lister and Rimmer yell in unison.

But Shayne has already pivoted on one foot and has slammed the toaster into the polymorph's face. Hard. The wounded monster reels back and transforms into some kind of bird, then a tennis ball, and then vanishes from sight. Cocking her head, Shayne can hear the high-pitched whine of a mosquito.

'It's gone too small t' see, guys,' she says, picking up the now battered toaster from the floor. 'Can we keep the toaster?'

'Yeah, okay, why not?' says Lister, when he finds his voice again.

'Excellent!' chirps the toaster. 'Anyone for a muffin?'


	20. New Torments

Shayne leaves the boys alone downstairs and pads up the cold metal stairs, her feet bare, her dark blue jeans, a size too big, flapping around her ankles, thicker where she has rolled the cuffs up. The shirt she wears is red and has only three buttons done up -- the top one is missing and the bottom one is undone because, unlike the jeans, the shirt is a size too small. She supposes she could get the Cat to do something about it, but can't be bothered asking -- it's not as if the thing doesn't fit at all, and at least she's got a semi-decent body under it.

Everyone else is downstairs, and she supposes she should be down there as well, but she needs just a few minutes of time out. She loves Kris quite a lot, but 'that hippie-dippie shit', as her father was wont to call it, just doesn't appeal to her. Right now, as she reaches the top of the stairs, Kris is sitting on the scanner table, swaying, and inviting everyone to join her in some 'healing meditation'. _Healing bullshit_, Shayne thinks, and it's this thought that takes her from the top of the stairs to three steps further until she realises there's something lying in the corridor. The fluorescent lights are starting to flicker on and off erratically.

Plastic. Something about five and a half feet long, wrapped in plastic.

Shayne remembers all the horror movies she ever watched, most of them from the twentieth century. Since the Great Movie Crash of 2078, when a bunch of scientists with nothing better to do had gone and proven that all the movies possible to make were based off a certain number of base movie concepts, and therefore, apart from the base movies, everyone was plagiarising the originals, not a lot of new movies had been made. The scientists had been the same ones, coincidentally, who'd caused the Great Music Crash the year before. Shayne remembers her movies, remembers all the bodies wrapped in plastic, and wonders for about three seconds if peeking inside that roll of plastic is a good idea. She decides it isn't. Then she peeks anyway.

Her own face, pale and dead, looks back at her. One eye has a starburst of blood in it. A smudge of blood under her nose, as well. Her hair is tangled around her head, and there's a long scar across her forehead.

Shayne stands up, kicks the bundle disdainfully, and says aloud, 'Is this th' best ya can do?'

If the polymorph is listening, it's not paying attention. The only thing it cares about is her emotions, which it has failed to rouse. The not-her shape on the floor shifts, grows larger, turns into Kochanski. Living, breathing, one second dead-not-her and now live-not-Kochanski. Shayne remains unimpressed.

'An' what about it?'

Not-Kochanski smiles. 'Come to bed with me, Shayne,' she whispers. 'It'll be _so_ good... I'll do you better than anyone else.'

Shayne stands her ground, wondering if she should call the others, her eyes flickering left and right, searching. 'Ya couldn' do me better than her,' she says. No weapons. She has herself. But that's always been enough. 'There's one thing ya missin'.'

'Baby, don't talk to me like that. Don't you know your Krissie when you see me?'

'I know her, yeah, an' ya _not_ her.' Shayne keeps her temper. 'Do ya think I'm blind or somethin'? I saw ya shapeshift, ya moron.'

'Oh, Shayne. You're imagining things. _I'm_ Krissie. You're just a little paranoid, that's all.' Not-Kochanski rolls her eyes in a way very like the real Kochanski. 'Come on, you're not telling me you think that woman downstairs is me? _I'm_ me. _She's_ the polymorph.' And some part of its illusionary power must extend to the victim's mind, because for a moment Shayne almost believes it.

'No.'

'Yes.' The not-Kochanski takes a step towards Shayne, reaching out with one hand -- Kochanski's hand, the nails trimmed short and then gnawed on, the bracelet round her right wrist that Shayne found for her. 'You're hurting me, Shayne. Don't you believe me?'

'I _saw_ ya shift,' Shayne says.

'Your mind's playing tricks on you,' not-Kochanski says. 'I was tying my shoelace and I stood up, that's all. Let's go downstairs. I want to see the others, and I want to see David. Don't you want to come downstairs where it's safe? You shouldn't be up here alone.'

'Speak for yaself.' Shayne takes a step back and not-Kochanski takes two forward. 'Stay back, I'm warnin' ya.'

'Shayne, I don't understand.' Crocodile tears fill the not-Kochanski's eyes. 'Don't you love me?'

'I love Kristine Kochanski. Ya ain't her.' Shayne takes another step back, then another, then finds her foot landing on empty space. The stairs. She almost falls down them, before catching the railing. 'I love her, an' nothin' will ever take that from me. Ya don' scare me. Nothin' ya can do will ever scare me enough t' make me let go of reality.' She manages, even now, to keep from being riled up. but then, hiding emotions has always come easily to Kerry Lee Shayne.

'But I don't _need_ to be her. You just need to _know_ I am.' Not-Kochanski moves forward again and Shayne steps back, then whirls, leaps, grabs the edge of the gantry just above the stairs and swings herself through the air, letting go and landing awkwardly in the midsection. Jolts of pain from her bare feet, but not broken, not sprained, just ow. The side of her head hitting the deck hurts worse.

A cry from above, 'Come back here, lover!'

Shayne rolls over, rubs her feet, grimacing, and stands up. The others are staring at her like she's a six-eyed yeti. She feels like it. Her vision is blurry from the knock to the head, but she has enough brain left to yell, 'Get up there! Th' polymorph's up there! Kill it!' Lister and Rimmer go racing past her, the world spins, and Shayne blacks out.

* * *

Krissie. Where...?

Hand on her forehead. Krissie? Shayne mouths nothingness. No voice.

Okay, if someone doesn't speak, very very soon, Shayne is going to get mad. Her eyelids are painted on. She cannot open them. Are they real? Is anything? Bed under her, she can feel it. Hospital bed? Move hands. Skinny bed. Definitely not her own bed. Hospital bed.

Hurts to think...

One eye opens. Kryten is watching her. Nobody else is there.

Shayne tries again for words. 'Kryte?'

'Ma'am, you're awake?'

'Yes. Where am I?'

'The medi-bay. The knock to your head... you've been out for three days.'

'Th' polymorph?'

'Dead. Mr. Lister and Mr. Rimmer killed it.'

'Everyone okay?'

'Except you.'

_Bedside manner could use some work, Kryte_. 'Why me?' Then she remembers. 'Never mind.' And notices for the first time the needle poked into her left hand, the thin plastic tube leading to the bag of clear liquid hanging on the IV stand by her head. 'So ya started the chemo.'

'I'm sorry I did it without your consent, ma'am, but you were unconscious, and you... your nose... when you hit your head, it started bleeding and wouldn't stop for hours. I've done a transfusion, too.'

'Blood?' Of course, she knows he means blood, _she_ means where did it come from, and somehow he picks up on this. Maybe he knows Shayne is nobody's fool.

'Your blood type was matched by that of Miss Vaughan, ma'am. She's offered to give whatever you need, should anything else happen.'

'Saved my life again.' Shayne smiles. 'Where are they all?'

'Downstairs. I've hardly managed to keep them from your side, but they finally accepted that you needed to rest. I'll keep you on this course of chemicals until the current bag runs out, then you can take a break for a while and then go back to them.'

'Fine.' Shayne is in no position to argue. She rolls over as much as the IV and the EEG electrodes taped to her head will allow, and sleeps again, unaware of the first red hairs lying on the pillow, separate from her.

* * *

Awakening again, and there is Kochanski, looking concerned, leaning over her bed.

'Shayne? You okay?'

'Mmmm. Krissie, I gotta tell ya...'

'Yeah, baby?'

'I love ya. Really.'

'Love you too.'


	21. New Unknowns

Lister and Rimmer run past Shayne, almost pausing to help her up except that they see that Kryten is moving to do it. Bazookoids grabbed from the rack on the wall, then up the stairs.

'There. It's being Krissie,' Lister says, pointing.

'We can take it now,' Rimmer says, flicking the safety off, chambering a round.

The polymorph, however, has other ideas, and bolts. Its shape changes as it goes -- not back to coffee, this time, but to a bird, tiny and quick, which darts through the air too fast for either bazookoid to find a target.

'Play it that way, then,' Lister grumps. 'We've got to do something to get its attention.'

'Like?' Rimmer is still trying to target the damn thing.

'It feeds off emotions, right? So we give it emotions.'

'Like?' Rimmer repeats.

Lister rubs the palm of his hand over the front of Rimmer's trousers, eliciting a gasp. 'Can you think of anything better, loverboy?' There's the hint of a laugh in that sentence, and Rimmer laughs as well, letting Lister catch his hand and drag him into their bedroom, leaving the door open.

'You always have good ideas.' Rimmer grabs Lister's hair, still clean, still in his sleek Seb Doyle ponytail. 'I like your ideas.'

'Mmmm. Like the...'

'Yeah.' Rimmer pulls Lister up against himself, kisses him. Part of his mind belongs to another version of himself, but every bit of his mind is focused on the man in his arms, the hardness against his leg, the contrasting softness of Lister's mouth under his. 'What's the quickest way to... produce the most emotion?'

'Um. We didn't try this yet...' Lister fumbles his belt off, holds it out to Rimmer, one end twisted around his wrist. 'I know you weren't sure...'

'You want me to tie you?'

Lister nods, face probably reddening, and Rimmer doesn't laugh, because the idea is very appealing, at least according to his cock. In fact, he has to take a step back and a deep breath not to come in his pants. Heh. Innocent Rimmer, boring, lowly technician, invited to fulfil lovely bondage fantasies. Granted, when he was fifteen and masturbating over them, he used to think of women, but... and he can't stand to think and not do anything, so he has to do something before he loses his mind.

'Okay then. Strip.'

Lister pulls his boots off and throws them so they hit the wall. His socks follow them, making a lot less noise. Then his black jeans, his black T-shirt, and his black underpants. Rimmer likes him in black, likes him out of it more.

'Now what?'

'Lie face down, hands above your head.' Rimmer stifles a snicker. _Never would've ordered him around like this back on Red Dwarf_... He looks for something to hook the belt to, spots the railing just above the pillow, and loops the belt around Lister's wrists, then around the railing. _How kind of them to think of us when they designed the ship_. It's a pretty minimal thing, but Rimmer thinks it's to make the beds feel more... bedlike, and less like the bunks at a military camp. Lister has his head slightly to the side so that he can breathe. He is also unsubtly half-humping the mattress.

'Stay still.' Rimmer starts stripping, folding his clothes onto the chair rather than leaving them all over the floor. 'Do you want to waste this experience on the sheets?'

'No, sir.' Lister's voice is muffled, but amused.

There's a brief lull while Rimmer locates the lube -- it's on the table, not under the pillow, for whatever reason -- and then he comes back to the bunk, setting the bazookoid carefully within reach.

'Are you sure?'

'Yes, dammit.' Lister rolls his single visible eye. 'Come on, tiger.'

Rimmer makes a disparaging noise with his tongue and lips, then applies them lightly to the back of Lister's neck. 'You look... very interesting,' he says in a low whisper.

'Mmmm?'

'Yeah.' Rimmer runs a lube-slicked finger over Lister's right buttock and then down, circling the tight ring of muscle. 'Did you ever read _The Story of O_?'

'Sort of.'

Rimmer loses his train of thought temporarily. '_Sort of_? What does that mean?'

Lister fidgets, then whimpers at the way Rimmer's finger almost slides into him when he does it. 'Comic book?'

'You're pathetic.' Rimmer dips his finger in to the first knuckle then withdraws it. 'But you're also very, very horny, am I right?'

Lister groans. 'I thought the idea of this was to get... um... emotional quickly.'

'So it was,' Rimmer agrees, and his finger slips all the way in, the tip grazing Lister's prostate, making him moan. 'I'll have to do something about that, then.' He gets serious with the lube, although he can't help teasing Lister with his fingers, just a little, just to hear the man cry out. Then he nudges Lister's legs apart with one knee, kneels between them, ducking his head so he won't hit it (close quarters in here, boys, but it'll do you, Shayne had said when they first moved in, with that smile of hers) on the bunk above.

Lister unable to move... it's interesting, yes. Lister completely at his mercy, open and vulnerable, under his control... Rimmer has to pause again to keep from coming all over Lister's back or something. Then he moves down (and Lister feels his cock like red-hot metal, trailing down between his buttocks, and pushes hard against it) and in (and Lister moans, wriggles against his bonds, moans again).

'Keep quiet,' Rimmer says softly, 'or the others will come running up here thinking we're bring attacked. You don't want them to see us, do you?'

'Polymorph?'

'No. He'll come all right, but to the emotion, not the noise. Keep your mouth shut, unless you want to be caught. _Do_ you want to be caught, Lister? Do you _want_ Kochanski to see you tied up and being fucked?' Actually, _that's_ an interesting thought as well, and the way Lister gasps and then starts humping the mattress again indicates that he agrees.

'You would, wouldn't you? Like Kochanski to watch us? Hmmm?' Rimmer varies his movements just enough to surprise Lister and to keep himself from coming too soon. He can hear something at the door. He doesn't look, just hopes it's the polymorph and not Kryten. 'You want her to watch, maybe? Think she'd get off on it?'

'...mmmm... yeah...'

'Maybe we can arrange it. You want that?'

'...man... I'm gonna...' Lister lets out a strangled yelp. Rimmer can see a bright spot of blood on the pillow. Lister has bitten his lip. And Rimmer slows, almost to a halt.

'Don't stop. Please.'

Rimmer drives in deep, and Lister hitches in breath to scream, but Rimmer's hand goes over his mouth and Rimmer's voice hisses next to his ear, 'I _told_ you to keep quiet!' And then everything explodes in a starburst of colour as Lister comes violently, setting Rimmer off. They're almost too involved to notice the polymorph's growl...

...but somehow Rimmer hears it, over Lister's animal noises and his own rapid panting, and without pulling out of Lister's warmth he grabs the bazookoid one-handed -- almost drops it, it's heavy -- then balances it on Lister's back and fires, once, twice, three times, at the hideous creature looming by the bed.

And the polymorph explodes.

Rimmer collapses onto Lister and they both lie still, breathing heavily, for a long moment.

'Rimmer?'

'Mmmm?'

'It worked.'

'Yes.'

Pause.

'Rimmer?'

'Mmmm?'

'My hands're goin' to sleep. Can you untie me now?'

'Sorry.'


	22. New Visions

_Three Months Later..._

Kryten takes the sensor pad off JayVee's rounding belly. 'Everything's well in order,' he says, nodding at the screen. 'Your first trimester has gone well. I'm very pleased.'

JayVee rubs her stomach and smiles selfconsciously. 'Am I supposed to be getting fat already?' she asks. 'I'm sure I read somewhere that most women don't show until the fourth or even fifth month.'

Kryten tries not to look guilty and fails, as if it's his fault anyway. 'Well... you are very slim, ma'am,' he says.

'I sense an "and".'

'...and we must bear in mind Cat physiology, ma'am, and certain tendencies...'

For a moment JayVee thinks he's talking about the whole... cock thing... then it sinks in. 'What?'

'The children, ma'am. Er... Litters of kittens?...'

'Uh-uh. No _way_. I'm _not_ having a _litter_. No, no, no,' JayVee says in what would be a very reasonable tone, save for the slight edge of hysteria.

'Ma'am, please. You'll wake Miss Shayne.' JayVee opens her mouth, but Kryten beats her to it. 'I know... one year, six months, and seventeen days. I know. I just can't get the hang of this whole 'familiarity' thing.'

JayVee glances over to where Shayne is sleeping through her latest course of chemo. 'Kryte?'

'Yes, ma'am?'

'You're an idiot.' She pauses. 'Do you really think I'll have a litter?'

Kryten shakes his head. 'Oh, no, ma'am. Your DNA is different enough to ensure that a combination of the two would weaken the Cat's DNA.'

'Good.'

'However, I wouldn't rule out twins, or even triplets...' Kryten's voice trails off as JayVee begins methodically banging her head on the pillow.

* * *

The Cat takes the news with remarkably more equanimity, although this might be due to the fact that he is more focused on steering between two red giants than actually paying attention to his lover.

'Cat, _listen_ to me,' JayVee begs. '_Two_ babies, maybe even three.' She is holding Madonna the cat, cuddling her close. 'How will we manage?'

The Cat makes a hard left to avoid a solar flare, then hands over control to Lister and meets JayVee's worried violet eyes. 'Baby,' he grins, 'however many babies we have, they'll have all these aunts and uncles. Come on, now, Bud-Babe isn't gonna have her own babies, and Monkey-boy and Goalpost-head aren't either.' He still hasn't been persuaded not to call Rimmer 'Goalpost-head'; however, Shayne is nickname-free and has been since they met. 'They can help us. It'll be all right.'

'Okay,' JayVee says. 'If you think so.'

'Of course we'll help,' Lister says. 'Why wouldn't we?' Less focused on his work than the Cat, he is steering with his feet and watching JayVee as well. 'The kids'll be a symbol of our freedom from the tyranny of the JMC.'

'And a symbol of my freedom from ever having a life,' JayVee sighs.

* * *

Kochanski, who JayVee finds twenty minutes later sitting with Shayne, seconds Lister's opinion.

'If we didn't at least _offer_ to help we'd be the worst kind of friend,' she says. 'For my part, I'm looking forward to helping put them to bed and everything. And I know Kryten's already thinking of all the extra clothes he'll get to wash.' JayVee groans. 'Speaking of which, we'll have to start looking for material and stuff on the derelicts -- we might even find baby clothes on some of them. They'll be old, but we can use them.'

'An' t' show _my_ friendship, I'm gonna let them call me _Auntie_ Shayne,' Shayne offers from the bed.

JayVee giggles. 'Shayne, you're still hopeless.'

'That's right.'

Life has settled into a new routine fairly quickly, one that can accommodate Shayne's bi-weekly chemo treatments and JayVee's unpredictable morning sickness. They have not heard from the mining ship again. No more polymorphs have snuck on board disguised as coffee or anything else, and a new screening process for everything taken from any derelict has been instigated. Without danger, without _Red Dwarf_, life is beginning to be worth living again. Rimmer's birthday (which one? they can't remember) has been; Lister's is less than two months away. Shayne can't even remember hers.

'I worked out that according to at least five of the ship's rules, we're illegal,' Lister says, coming into the room with a copy of the _Starbug_ manual.

'You're weird,' the three girls chorus.

'I know.' Lister looks at them - unbidden thoughts of voyeurism dancing in his head -- and grins. 'Reason I came up, Cat's spotted a new derelict up ahead. As soon as we're completely clear of these suns, we'll check it out.'

'Sounds like a plan,' Kochanski says. Their eyes meet across the room. _If only..._ echoes in her mind again. She does, sometimes, still wish that she was having a baby herself. And she lowers her eyes -- conveniently, to Shayne - and pushes it away from her mind.

* * *

The derelict is small and red. The derelict is almost triangular, long and pointed. The derelict is a one-person craft, with a single pilot's seat under the Plexiglass dome, and minimal room for supplies.

The derelict is _Wildfire_.

Lister wants to go over and look, but Kochanski dissuades him and somehow Shayne ends up going, easing the helmet over her smooth scalp. Kryten has assured her that the hair will grow back when the chemo is all over. She hopes she hasn't got long to go.

'All right. Suit,' she orders, and Kochanski helps her into it, locking the helmet into place where it joins at the neck. 'Airlock.' She steps into the airlock, hooks her jetline to the clip just inside the doorway, and waves as soon as the door closes for them to open the outer door.

Kochanski watches her tumbling out into space and wonders what it would be like to make love in zero gravity.

* * *

Shayne's breathing is loud to her own ears, the rhythmic hiss-hiss of the oxygen and carbon dioxide in the tubes. She presses her chin down against the microphone.

'Can ya hear me, _Starbug_?'

'Loud and clear, Shayne,' comes Lister's reply through the helmet radio. 'Head on over and see what you can see.'

Shayne manoeuvres on the end of her line over to the downed _Wildfire_. Even as far as they've come from the twin suns, she can vaguely feel the heat from them when she touches the metal hull of the ship.

'Can't see any movement from inside,' she says, peering through the dome. 'Goin' to airlock now.' She crab-walks to the airlock, small and disused. The ship's usual occupant doesn't use it much -- it's mostly for supplies, not people. The dome itself is the people entrance - but she doesn't know how to open it from the outside. The airlock, on the other hand, is easy. She grips the wheel, spins it, feels the clunk as gears engage and the door slowly swings outwards.

'I'm hookin' my jetline t' the outside clip.' She does so, clinging tightly to the door with her free hand. Letting go would mean potentially spiralling off into space, and that would mean her death. She swings herself inside, pulls the door closed, and pushes the release button for the inside door, which she can actually hear clunking open now she's no longer in space. 'I'm in.'

'What do you see?'

'Boxes.' Shayne fumbles, finds the flashlight hanging from her belt, and switches it on. 'Just storage, I think. Food, water, supplies. There's a camp bed in th' corner.' She swings the torch slowly around the small room. 'Bathroom,' she announces, plodding towards it, sliding the visor of the helmet open to conserve her air. 'Th' door's shut. I'm openin' it.'

'Be careful.'

'Why? Think he might be in th' shower? It's nothin' I haven' seen before.' Shayne slides the door open, secretly anticipating a body on the floor, but the room is bereft of either life or death. The shower is dripping slightly.

The cockpit, then.

Before she gets to the cockpit, though, walking through the narrow passage between it and the storage bay, she finds what they all know she is looking for. Not a body -- not a real one, anyway -- but a light bee. Her foot knocks it and it skitters ahead of her, into the cockpit. Shayne chases it down and picks it up.

'Got somethin'.' Her voice is flat.

'What is it?' Lister asks.

'Light bee.'

'Turn it around. Has it got initials engraved on it? Any sort of visible markings?'

Shayne doesn't need to study it that closely; she can't. It's completely black, split almost in half, and -- as she discovers by shaking it -- empty.

'It's ruined.' It's all she can think of to say, and there is silence from the other end of the line. 'Sorry.' She kneels down with the light and looks along the corridor, but whatever the contents of the light bee look like -- she imagines some kind of metal workings -- they aren't there. The floor is bare. 'It's ruined,' she repeats, and this time gets back, 'Okay. Come back then.'

'Hang on.' She locates the black box and pulls it out of its housing. She tries to switch the computer on, but the main power button is marked with a fingerprint detector. There's no error message or anything, it just doesn't switch on when she tries it. She has the feeling that even if it _did_ switch on, nothing would happen. She isn't Ace; none of them are. None of them could be. Not even Rimmer.

She sticks the light bee in her pocket and zips it shut, then replaces her helmet and clumps back out to the airlock. Something catches her eye in the storage room -- a small crate, marked _Caskets and Transmitters_. She opens it, finds the small yellow boxes inside, and understands instinctively what they are for, and takes one, along with the transmitter that slips neatly into the housing on the front.

Then she leaves the ship, leaves the past behind on board that silent Space Corps corpse.


	23. New Wishes

And now it is December. Christmas Day. JayVee is seven months and a bit along, mountainous in maternity clothes she hates. Twins, Kryten has told her, and JayVee has given up kicking and screaming about it to accept it and begin sorting through the clothes they have found. She wants one boy and one girl. The Cat is more anxious about it than she is, now.

Kryten has brought out the tinsel and the Christmas decorations from the storage area. Their last Christmas was in the Brig; he intends to make it something special, not just another day like any other. The smell of turkey, found in a stasis block midway through November and held in reserve until now, fills the whole ship. The potatoes need to go in soon. Kryten is in mechanoid heaven with everything that has to be done.

JayVee is at the scanner table, writing Christmas cards. She is using lined paper. Real Christmas cards were the one thing they could not find. The Cat is in the cockpit, and Lister, Rimmer, Shayne and Kochanski are all upstairs gift wrapping. The presents, scraped together from the few valuables found on the derelicts, will be distributed after the meal; Shayne, wearing a Santa hat over her slowly growing back hair, will be presiding over affairs.

* * *

'Kris?'

'Hmmm? Yes, baby?'

'What're ya thinkin' about?'

Kochanski looks up. 'At the moment, trying to get this last piece of tape off my fingers and onto the paper. I don't particularly want to have my fingers stuck together for the rest of my life.'

Shayne reaches out and does it for her, glancing pointedly at the clock. 'All I'm sayin' is there's over two hours till we get t' go an' eat that turkey, an' we're done with the gift wrappin'. So...' She pauses for a moment. 'What're we gonna do t' kill the time in between?'

'I don't know about you, but I could use a bath,' says Kochanski. She gets up, frowning at the sticky residue of tape on her fingers, but Shayne has already moved to start filling the bath -- a hose from the shower nozzle does the trick, usually, except if it comes unhooked and sprays water everywhere. Fortunately, that's only happened twice. 'While it's filling I'll take these downstairs.' She loads the presents into their laundry basket -- empty -- and lugs it out of the room.

Shayne watches her go, then turns her attention back to the shower head. It looks like the hose is slipping off the thing, but she can't see it properly, even when she stands on the crate she used to reach the damn thing in the first place. If only she wasn't so short. She wonders if Kris would be able to see better, then gives up and hollers for Rimmer, who comes in with tape stuck to his nose.

'What's wrong?'

'Is that thing movin'? I don't wanna worry about it comin' off again.'

Rimmer looks at it carefully, then pulls the tape off his nose and slaps it over the seam between hose and shower. 'That should do the trick.'

'Thanks.'

'Don't mention it.' Rimmer turns to leave. 'What're you doing until dinner?'

'Krissie's havin' a bath... that mightn' take two hours... why?'

'Listy said to ask if you two wanted to join us for a game of Monopoly or something.' Rimmer rolls his eyes. 'He's trying to prove he's not scared of playing it, I think.'

Shayne smiles and gets off the crate. 'We'll let ya know, okay? After Krissie's bath.'

'Sure, okay.' Rimmer looks like he wants to hang around and watch the promised bath, but leaves, almost running into Kochanski and the laundry basket on their way back into the room. Shayne giggles to herself, trying not to make it obvious that she knows exactly what Rimmer is thinking.

'Krissie?'

'Yeah, okay, I'll lock the door. I don't want anyone walking in on me in the bath,' Kochanski says, grinning. Shayne smirks back, and that's when the hose snaps off the shower head and saturates her to the skin.

'Shit!' Shayne fumbles for the tap, switches it to dead cold before managing to get the water to stop. She stands dripping wet and still, mind trying to locate the towels. The sound of decidedly muffled snickering catches her attention, however, and she looks to its source instead. Kochanski has her hands over her mouth, trying to keep from laughing, but she can't help it.

'Oh, Shayne...'

'I know, I know, now I know how it feels, right?' Shayne catches Kochanski's wrist and pushes her into the mostly full bathtub with a splash. 'If I gotta be wet, you gotta be wet.'

'No comment.'

Shayne splashes her. 'I thought _I_ was the disgustin' one.'

'Oh, not at all.' Kochanski openly stares. 'Jeez, Shayne, ever enter a wet T-shirt competition?' Shayne looks down. Oh. White. Well, it was white. Now it's clingy and kind of pink because of her skin. Her jeans are dappled with dark blue patches, dry-ish from the calves on down.

'Speak for yaself.' She nods down at Kochanski, sprawled in the bath. Kochanski hasn't even bothered to get dressed, and is still wearing the white singlet and boxer shorts she wore to bed the night before. Shayne feels a wave of lust so strong it's almost painful, and splashes into the water with her lover.

'Hi there.'

'Hi,' Shayne returns. _Amused bright blue eyes. Dripping wet white clothes clinging. Beautiful woman._ She hasn't thought in haikus since learning about them in school. 'I think I gotta kiss ya now.'

'No problem.' Kochanski reaches out and they move together, clinging to each other, wet clothes sticking together, their mouths meeting someplace in the middle and their tongues there too. Kochanski's hand presses against the crotch of Shayne's jeans, knowing what she won't be wearing under there, also knowing that the next two hours are going to be more than adequately filled with one kind of amusement or another.

'Mmmm... Kris, ya taste good.' Shayne licks a drop of water off Kochanski's cheek with a quick flick of her tongue.

Kochanski reaches over the side of the tub. 'I brought something up from downstairs.' She holds up a sprig of fake plastic mistletoe, clearly broken off the spray of fake plastic mistletoe that currently resides over the scanner table. 'Look.'

Shayne shakes her head, sending a fine mist of water into the air. 'An' like we need an excuse?'

Kochanski just holds the mistletoe up between them, and they meet in the middle again, lips meeting, tongues touching, even teeth clashing once as they kiss. She drops the mistletoe when Shayne's hand sneaks between her legs, the sodden satin scarcely a barrier between her and Shayne's fingers.

'Nice.'

'Nice too,' Shayne says, nudging the material out of the way, her fingers making the transition from water to skin easily. 'Hey, if ya met me, an' we weren't in th' Brig, would ya still want this?'

'Um.' Kochanski hasn't got words.

'What would happen if I kissed ya? Would ya like it then?'

'I... think so. I'd like to hope so.'

Shayne's little mouth crushes against hers again; Shayne's fingers find her clitoris and tease a moan out of her. Kochanski feels like she could drown now and die happy.

'I would,' she mumbles against Shayne's lips.

'Ya would?'

'I'd be with you even if we weren't in the Brig. If I met you outside of it, got to know you...' Kochanski moans again. 'Really.'

'Good.' Shayne takes her hand back and lifts Kochanski out of the water.

'What? What're you doing?'

'Tryin' not t' drown myself. Don' worry, we're not goin' far.' Shayne puts Kochanski down on the floor -- the decidedly wet floor, the water has spilled over from their movements -- and tugs insistently on her boxers until Kochanski moves enough for Shayne to drag them off her. She lowers her head and licks water off Kochanski's thigh, tasting the salt of her skin, then moves in deeper, tasting that other taste, that is just Kochanski. She feels Kochanski's hands on her head, rubbing over the fine fuzz of hair, holding her close, and responds to the woman's need with her tongue and lips and lightly grazing teeth.

They end up back in the bath, which has gone cold, a long time later, both satiated and even tired. Kochanski washes Shayne's back with long, gentle strokes; she rubs shampoo into Shayne's hair, noting quietly how long it's getting, although 'long' is relative -- the new growth is about an inch long.

Shayne's cancer has been in remission for just over a month.

In so many ways, this is the only Christmas present they need.


	24. New Xmases

The Christmas dinner is a huge success. The food is perfectly cooked, of course, and it manages to keep everyone's attention for the duration of the meal, including JayVee, who has been staring intermittently at the pile of presents under the tree in the corner. They have a fake tree, of course, real trees are too hard to come by in Deep Space.

'What do you think's in your present, Jayv?' Kochanski asks, playing with the gravy boat.

'A whole lot of X-chromosomes,' JayVee says.

'Why not Y?' Lister asks.

'You think I _want_ boys?' JayVee shakes her head. 'I want girls. Two of 'em -- if I'm having twins, I get to pick, and I want girls.'

'I keep telling you, ma'am, it would be perfectly simple to determine the gender of both foetuses now, if you want to,' Kryten says.

'I want to be surprised,' JayVee says. She takes the gravy boat from Kochanski and places it firmly on the other side of the table. 'Kris, you'd've spilt that, I could see it coming.'

'Yes, Mum,' Kochanski deadpans.

'You are so, so funny. Oh, you're making me ache with laughter.' JayVee starts playing with the spoon in the cranberry sauce. 'I... oh, shit.'

'It's lucky we never found a tablecloth,' Kochanski says as JayVee hides her face in her hands and Kryten, tsking, wipes the blob of sauce off the table with a napkin. 'That would've stained for sure.'

'Kris...'

'Presents!' Shayne neatly diffuses the situation. The tree in the corner has a newly installed couch next to it, and a couple of beanbags on the floor for those people who don't fit on the couch. JayVee and Cat take the couch, Kochanski sits on the arm of it, one arm around JayVee, and Lister and Rimmer curl up on one beanbag, Lister leaning back against Rimmer. Kryten takes the opportunity for a few happy snaps while Shayne starts handing out presents, then joins the group, roboting down onto the other beanbag. He looks exceedingly uncomfortable.

'Kryte, this is for you from all of us,' Shayne says, passing him a soft package. 'Jayv, for you from Cat... Kris, for you, from 'Dave and Arn'...' She snickers, and keeps going until everyone has at least one present to open, and more wait under the tree.

Soon, the floor is covered in wrapping paper and ribbon and tape. Each person has a small stack of gifts in front of them. Lister and Rimmer are silently communing over the rings they have found each other. JayVee is shuffling her Tarot cards. The Cat is counting a bagful of sequins and debating what to use them for. Kochanski is painting her nails red. Kryten is admiring his new apron and oven mitts. And Shayne is watching them all, her hand occasionally going to her head, ruffling through the soft hair there.

Right now, even with JayVee right there and so big with her children, Shayne feels like the mother. And, she decides, it's not such a bad way to feel.

'Does anyone want me to read their tarot?' JayVee asks, flicking through the pages of the book that came with the cards. Kochanski volunteers first, and JayVee hands her the cards to shuffle while she clears a space on the floor. They're both ready at the same time and JayVee settles herself on the floor, taking the cards and laying them out in front of herself. Kochanski comes and sits on the floor, leaning against Lister, who puts an arm around her.

'Okay. I'm just doing a kind of everything reading. The first card represents you, and it's...' JayVee flips it up. 'Queen of Cups.' She consults her book. 'That means you're an emotionally sensitive woman.' Kochanski pretends to cry, and JayVee rolls her eyes, continuing. 'The next one's a potential problem... um... okay, five of coins, unforeseen expenses... right, I can see how that would totally be a problem, given that we're in Deep Space and haven't seen a shop except those we've robbed in about a year.' Kochanski gives her the finger. 'Hey, don't give the finger to the tarot reader. It's bad luck.'

'Really?' the Cat asks.

'Meh. Probably,' JayVee says.

'Right.' The Cat doesn't get it.

'Your goal... okay, hmmm, the Lovers... wonder what that can mean... watch it, I warned you about doing that,' JayVee says, flapping one hand at Kochanski's raised finger. 'It means intensity in relationships, so you're gonna get married or something. Now, distant past influences... we've got the page of cups, which means new social contacts... so these new friends have something to do with your goal of intense relationships.'

'You're starting to sound convincing,' Rimmer comments.

JayVee eyeballs him. 'I'll do yours next, matey.'

'Meep,' Rimmer says.

'Ri-ight. Okay then. Recent past influences... nine of cups, experiencing life as a celebration... well, duh. _Future_ influences... we've got here the _two_ of cups, this time, which in your case means a new phase in your current relationship.' JayVee finds her water glass and takes a sip. Everyone's attention is riveted on her. 'The next one's about you again, and how you're gonna achieve your goal, and the card is the nine of wands, and the definition says to take down your barriers and let other people support you. I think it means emotionally.'

'What's next?' Shayne asks, looking interested. She is the one who gave JayVee the cards, knowing JayVee would like them even if Shayne doesn't believe them, but she's being convinced. Slowly.

'Um. It's Kris's influence over others. And the card's queen of wands, saying she's a woman of leadership... bossy in bed, Kris? ... I'm joking, Shayne, put the glass down, we all know you'd be the dominant one.'

'Not true,' Kochanski says, but she says it so quietly nobody hears her.

'Last two. Um. This one's your hidden emotions and secret desires, Kris.' JayVee flourishes, turning the card over. 'And it's the World, and it's reversed... that means it's upside down. And _that_ means that you're secretly afraid of carrying the world on your shoulders. Makes sense when you think about it, Kris -- you're kind of a leader but you don't want to be?' JayVee's eyes are anxious, wondering if she's right, and Kochanski's nod relieves her. 'Last card's an overview of the general situation.' She turns it over.

'_Death_?' Lister asks.

'What?' Kochanski says.

'No, wait, it doesn't _mean_ death, though. It means like rebirth, the opportunity of new things to grow -- getting rid of negative stuff to make way for good stuff,' JayVee says hastily.

'Oh,' Shayne says. She picks the card up and looks at it. 'Funny how a piece of paper can mean all that.' She puts it neatly back in its place. Her nose bled that morning. She thinks it was only from the heat. 'Do mine?'

'After Rimmer,' JayVee says, grinning, and Rimmer groans and wiggles out from under Lister and Kochanski to sit cross-legged in front of her.

'What do I do?'

'Shuffle the cards. Do you want me to do the same for you as for Kris?'

'Can you find out about a more specific thing?' Rimmer asks.

'Yeah, of course. You want me to do a relationship one?' Rimmer nods. 'Okay. This one needs a little more work. Shuffle the cards, then gimme them and we'll get started.'

Paper. Or the future. Or something. Shayne wonders what JayVee's really got there in front of her. She wonders what _she_'s got ahead of her. And waits, patiently, for her turn with the cards.


	25. New Years

February.

The time has come at last for JayVee's babies. Valentine's Day -- how appropriate. The gift of love day all right. The lovemaking between her and Cat has brought her to this wonderful place -- hospital bed number three in the medi-bay. Lister has built a cot for the new arrivals -- actually built it himself, taking three hours a night for a week -- out of wood from emptied supply crates, painting it with a can of light lilac paint recovered from some derelict or another. Lilac -- pink for girls, blue for boys, but lilac, Lister says, when you don't have a clue.

JayVee knows, though. She's going to get her girls. It's not that Kryten has told her -- it's just her intuition. What she wants, she will get. And the tarot cards, when she asked them, came up with the High Priestess, which tells her to be guided by her intuition.

Of course, it could be a load of bullshit, but she's so out of it she can't tell. Epidural? You bet. Those things aren't coming out of her when she can still feel anything. The Cat's holding her hand. When the contractions hit, which is once every three seconds it feels like, she squeezes. His hand already has a mangle of fingernail marks on the back.

The loudspeakers, usually used to summon patients from one section of the room to another (given the size of the place, shouting would be more economical), are currently playing Madonna's 'Cherish'. JayVee tries to focus on the music, bops her head, then gives up and howls miserably as the next contraction whips around her midsection like a spiked belt turned inside out.

'Ma'am, don't push yet.' Kryten is worrying about between her legs. JayVee feels absolutely ridiculous. 'If you push too soon you could harm the babies.'

'I don't intend to push,' JayVee replies between gritted teeth (and it comes out sounding like _ai oh ited oo fuuush_ as a result). She relaxes her jaw and tries again. 'I thought you said this was gonna be Caesarean. I was a Caesar baby. So was my mother. It runs in the family. Just fucking cut me open, okay?'

'Ma'am, there could be complications...'

'YES! AND THERE COULD BE EVEN MORE FUCKING COMPLICATIONS IF I KICK YOUR SODDING PLASTIC HEAD IN, YOU TWERP!'

'Did she just call Kryten a twerp?' Lister whispers to Kochanski.

'Um-huh,' Kochanski says. 'She's in a bad mood.'

'So would you be if you had babies coming out of you,' Lister says.

'So would _you_.'

Lister winces. 'Ouch.'

They're standing in the doorway, as far in as Kryten will let them come. Rimmer, haemophobic and algophobic, is standing well back with his hands over his ears. Shayne is in the nurses' office operating the CD player.

'How much longer do I have to do this? Ow,' JayVee says, arching her back, with a lot of difficulty given the size of her 'bump'. 'Bump'? 'Small mountain' might be more appropriate. Tall and slim in her natural state, JayVee now looks vaguely like a small sperm whale.

Kryten gently explores with his fingers. JayVee closes her eyes and tries not to think about it. 'Not long, ma'am. We'll try for a natural birth first and then see what happens, all right?'

'Can't you just cut me open and get them _out_?'

'It's a dangerous operation, and I'll only do it if I have to,' Kryten says firmly.

JayVee rolls her eyes behind the closed lids. 'More anaesthetic?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Cat?'

'Yeah, baby?'

'We're never, ever, ever having sex again. Ever.'

'Sure, baby,' the Cat says, patting her hand. She has said it five times already, the first time when her waters broke. 'No more sex. I understand.' There's a snort from one of the watchers at the door -- probably Lister.

Shayne leaves the CD player running and comes out of the nurses' office, 'Borderline' beginning to play. 'Is anythin' happenin' yet?' she says.

'Yeah, JayVee's never going to have sex again, for the fifth time,' Kochanski says.

'Atta girl!' Shayne calls. 'Ya tell him good!'

JayVee turns her head towards Shayne. 'Kryten, just let them come in already. They can sit on the other beds.' Kryten mumbles words like 'sterile' and 'contaminants', but relents when JayVee glares at him.

'Come on, Rimmer,' Lister says.

'Er. No.'

'Come _on_. Just come and sit on the other bed with me. You can close your eyes if you have to, block your ears, whatever, but I think we should all be in there.'

Rimmer lets himself be dragged to the first bed, but no further; Shayne and Kochanski have already claimed the second bed, the one nearest JayVee, so it doesn't matter anyway. Shayne is bouncing. Kochanski sits and looks quietly maternal. JayVee's nails are digging into the Cat's hand again.

'Okay, ma'am, you can try pushing now,' Kryten says encouragingly. 'Get those babies out of there!'

JayVee opens her eyes, rolls them. 'Duh, Bog-Bot.' She tries to figure out which muscles to use, when another contraction hits her and does the job for her. She rides with it and finds it's a lot easier when she works with it instead of against it. But although she tries as hard as she can, it seems like nothing's happening.

'Again,' Kryten says. 'Try harder.'

'Come on, Jayv,' Kochanski says. 'Push.'

'Come on baby,' Cat agrees, attempting to prise JayVee's nails free, and succeeding, only to have them clamp down again as the next contraction hits.

* * *

Too much time passes. Kryten gets the few instruments he has found out of the steriliser. 'Miss Shayne or Miss Kochanski, will one of you assist me?' he asks. 'It'll have to be Caesarean.'

'Thank God,' JayVee groans, covered in sweat. The Cat frees his hand, wipes her face with a tissue. 'Get them _out_!'

'I'll help,' Shayne says; Kochanski was ready to offer, but backs off when Shayne steps up to the challenge. The code of ethics in medicine says you shouldn't treat your own friends or family because emotional ties - especially if they die -- can be troublesome. But this is no time to worry about conventions. Shayne is calm -- not bouncing any more -- and her hands aren't shaking the way Kochanski's are.

'All right.' Kryten hastily points out what the things on the tray are. 'When I ask for something, give it to me. If I put something back bloody, get it with the sterile wipes.' Shayne nods and puts a surgical mask on. She doesn't have to worry about her hair being in the way.

'Blood,' whispers Rimmer, his eyes rolling madly. Lister pats his thigh and he calms down.

The operation begins. Kryten hesitates only a moment before making the initial incision. JayVee can hardly feel it, given the amount of anaesthetic percolating through her system, but her hand goes tight on the Cat's, and her other hand flops on the side of the bed. Kochanski takes it and feels the intense pressure the Cat is feeling. Both of them will have fingernail marks on their hand for a couple of days.

'Clean that,' Kryten says, putting the scalpel down, his gloved hands moving warily but with an instinctive certainty. 'Need a clamp.' He's hit something that's bleeding too much. Shayne hands over what she thinks is right and Kryten closes the vein -- if that's what it is.

'Almost there,' Kochanski tells JayVee, catching Kryten's eye for reassurance. Kryten nods curtly and looks back down.

'Somethin's wrong,' Shayne says abruptly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: this story has a multiple-choice ending.
> 
> [New Zeroes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/47646/chapters/62474): Angst, romance; warning: character death.
> 
> [New Zones](http://archiveofourown.org/works/47646/chapters/62475): Angst, humour, romance; warning: character death.
> 
> [New Zodiacs](http://archiveofourown.org/works/47646/chapters/62476): Humour, romance; warning: happy ending


	26. New Zeroes

'Somethin's wrong,' Shayne repeats, her tone almost wondering. Everyone instinctively looks down at JayVee's opened belly, but they're looking in the wrong place. Blood-red rose blossoms appear on the surgical mask over Shayne's nose and mouth; with balletic grace she falls backwards, Kryten catching her just before she hits the floor. There is a pause, the tableau frozen, all the onlookers now staring at the ground.

'Shayne!' Kochanski screams.

Kryten carries Shayne to the second bed and puts her on it. Her eyes are closed and still. He pulls the mask off and blood spills over her face. Kochanski screams again, wordless, pleading.

'Miss Kochanski, you'll have to help me,' Kryten says. 'Mr. Lister, get a wet cloth and stop that bleeding.' He means Shayne, this time.

'Shayne...' Kochanski says.

'No. You _have_ to help me, Miss Kochanski, or we'll lose the babies.' JayVee has fainted; it's probably for the best. The Cat is frozen, clinging to her hand, eyes flicking from her to Shayne and back again.

Kochanski moves. She stands up, makes her shaky legs work. Behind her, Lister is wiping the blood from Shayne's face; Shayne's chest rises and falls erratically. Rimmer hasn't fainted, but looks on the verge of it.

'Rimmer, help me,' Lister says as Kryten, snapping on clean gloves, asks Kochanski to help him, hand him the scalpel again. 'I can't help her alone.'

'What...' Rimmer gulps, clears his throat. 'What do you need me to do?'

'That trolley. Bring it. It has an oxygen mask. She's not breathing properly.'

'Mind your hands. Put the gloves on,' Kryten says to Kochanski, who snaps the latex against her wrists, trying to snap her mind into action. 'Now we don't have all of what we need, so you're going to have to... hold the cut open.'

'What?' Kochanski stares at Kryten like he's off his trolley.

'Hold it. Now.' Kryten places her hands, pushes them apart. 'Like that.' And reaches into the space created, the sound in his ears not his own heart, but Kochanski's, thumping madly.

'Over her nose and mouth,' Lister says. 'That's right.'

Rimmer clumsily lifts Shayne's head and slides the elastic band around, fastening the mask in place. The bleeding has stopped, it seems, but a tiny spray of blood clouds the inside of the mask when Shayne first exhales.

'Is she all right?' Kochanski asks.

'She's breathing,' Lister says, lifting the mask, wiping the blood off, and replacing the mask. The balled up and bloody tissue lands just beside the bin near the door. 'Her heart's fine,' he adds, lifting her wrist.

'Hook her to the EEG,' Kryten says, concentrating on his own task.

'What?'

'The EEG. Electrodes on -- oh, you know how to do it, you've seen her before.'

'Why?'

'Just _do_ it, you thickwit!' Kryten snaps, in a shining example of what happens when mechanoids break their programming. 'Do it now!'

Kochanski draws in a deep breath, her eyes wide above her surgical mask. 'Oh, Jayv...' JayVee, still out cold, doesn't hear her, but the Cat does, and as Lister wheels the EEG machine over to Shayne's bedside, Kryten holds up first one, then the second baby, like a prize. Kochanski reaches out and takes one, the first-born; a girl. Kryten holds the other for a moment, the second-born; a boy.

'It's a girl, and a boy,' he announces. 'Born at seven past ten PM, the fourteenth of February.' No year. No weekday. Those, they don't know.

'We've got to worry about closing her now,' he says after a moment of silence around bed three. Bed two is the sounds of Lister directing Rimmer and one of the sterile swabs, placing the electrodes. 'Don't wake her up yet,' he adds to the Cat, 'we might as well let her sleep.'

Kochanski pats the little girl on the backside and the baby lets out her first cry. The boy, in Kryten's arms, is already wailing loudly. Kochanski finds a towel, does the best quick cleaning job she can, and places the baby in the cot beside the bed. The Cat leaves JayVee's side and comes around to look at his children as Kryten puts the boy down beside his sister.

'Oh, man.' It summarises everyone's feelings, in one way or another.

'Come on, Miss Kochanski. We've got to do this so she doesn't get an infection,' Kryten prompts, and Kochanski returns to his side, this time instead of handing him the scalpel, reaching for the sutures.

There is a beep as the EEG starts, showing steady theta waves -- according to the machine, at least, Shayne is in the beginning stages of deep sleep. Rimmer stares at the screen. Lister, marginally more sensible, finds the portable medi-scanner and fiddles with the controls, trying to figure out how to make it do what he wants. Kryten, glancing up for a second, realises what Lister's doing and manages to give him instructions as well as doing what he has to for JayVee.

They finish at roughly the same time. Kryten sticks a piece of steri-strip medical tape on the edge of the dressing over the cut on JayVee's belly. The blonde is starting to stir and wake up, and Kryten leaves her to it, leaning over Lister's shoulder to peer at the screen he is holding over Shayne's face.

'Don't let it move... that's it...' Kryten says as Lister manages to hold the stupid thing still. 'Okay, now hold it while it gets a picture...'

Amongst its limited functions, this basic medical scanner can build up minimal MRI images if held still long enough. Lister holds it still long enough. Both he and Kryten wish he hadn't been able to.

'All right.' Kryten lets out a breath he never inhaled and didn't realise he was holding. 'I'll need to do something more than that, though. Proper tests...'

'What's going on?' demands Kochanski, who is holding the baby girl again. The Cat looks up from trying to wake JayVee. 'What's wrong?'

Kryten doesn't inhale; holds the breath he doesn't draw; sees her steely eyes and knows he has to answer. 'I think she's fallen back out of remission. I think the cancer's beginning to grow again.'

* * *

It's always different, yet always the same. When somebody close to you dies, depending on the relationship, your reaction differs in detail, but underneath it's the same: you mourn.

'Time of death: four twenty-seven PM, twenty-seventh of April.'

As Kryten pulls the sheet up over the silent, unbreathing face, Kochanski stands beside the bed, hands straight down by her sides. JayVee, nursing Leah, and the Cat, holding Liam, hover uncertainly in the doorway. Rimmer and Lister, holding hands, stand next to them. They are together; Kochanski stands alone by the bed, and now she _is_ alone.

She doesn't have any sensible questions, like _how?_ She knows how -- the failure of a malignant tumour to respond to either chemical or other treatment. The temporary remission was just that -- temporary. Do chemicals go bad, over time? She thinks maybe they do. She thinks that's the only sensible question, and maybe she'll never know if the chemo failed because of it. The only real question, the one without an answer but the only one she wants an answer for, is _Why?_ Why Shayne? Why her? Why now? Why only twenty-five years of life, why only one year of true love?

But there's never a reason for death.

She feels like she's hit rock bottom, the ultimate zero. But then, Shayne's the one who's got ultimate nothingness now. What Kochanski has is a long climb back to reality and stability -- alone. She doesn't even have the comfort of a soft-light hologram of her lover. That one chance, lost because the system is not working.

Kochanski reaches out and pulls the sheet back down. Shayne looks like maybe she's found real peace at last, at this the end of her tumultuous life. Her face is still, quiet and pale. Her eyes are open. Kochanski moves to close them, but then leaves them open. Why should she change anything now?

'Love you, baby,' she says at last, leaning down and brushing a kiss over the pale lips. 'Love you forever.'


	27. New Zones

'What's wrong?' JayVee struggles to see over the mound of her own stomach. Kochanski urges her to lie still.

Shayne's eyes, wide above the mask, meet Kryten's. He looks down, noticing the same thing she has; or rather, lack of thing -- there's no movement, not even a little, from inside JayVee's womb.

'It's okay,' Shayne says, muffled. 'I panicked.' Maybe she did, after all. She hasn't a clue how much foetuses are supposed to move or not move. Maybe this is normal.

The operation goes on.

* * *

'I thought I didn't want them,' JayVee says, sobbing. 'I was so afraid to have them. But I was ready, I made my mind ready, I was all ready, and now they're gone.'

Shayne holds her hand on one side, the Cat on the other. JayVee rocks, her head thudding softly against the pillow. There's blood on the sheet, just a few spots. Kryten has cleaned up well.

'I thought I'd make a bad mother.'

'Ya woulda made a terrific mother,' Shayne says.

JayVee rocks. 'Not now.'

'It'll be okay, baby,' the Cat says, showing more tenderness than anyone has ever seen him express. 'You'll be okay. We can have other children someday, too, when you're okay.'

On the other side of the room, Kryten and Kochanski are quietly debating what to do with the two tiny bodies. Lister and Rimmer have left the room -- it's not that they don't want to support JayVee, but right now she wouldn't notice if Brad Pitt came in to hold her hand. She barely notices the Cat and Shayne as it is. Her mind is off elsewhere -- not with the fairies, but with two more tangible little people who also don't exist.

Shayne raises her voice. 'Kryte, d'ya think she needs a sedative?'

JayVee rocks, her head making light noises each time it contacts the pillow

* * *

_Two Days Later_

Funeral.

JayVee, walking like an old woman, descends the stairs to the midsection. _Starbug_ is on autopilot, navigating itself through the cartwheel of stars. The Waste Disposal Unit, though it seems cruel; two canisters, one labelled _Leah_, the other _Liam_. She was half right about having two girls.

The Cat lets JayVee's arm go and JayVee leans against the wall next to the unit. Kryten has programmed it to shoot the canisters into space, just like the way people were 'buried' on _Red Dwarf_, the way Lister has described to him.

'We're gathered here to mourn the passing of Leah and Liam Vaughan, taken before their time,' Kryten begins.

'Shut up,' JayVee says quietly, and Kryten shuts up, looking at her. 'I want to talk.'

'Go ahead, Jayv,' Shayne says.

'These babies were mine for nine months. I felt them grow, felt them move and kick and all that stuff. I was terrified of having them to begin with, but then I got used to the idea and it was gonna be okay.' JayVee clasps her hands over her stomach, hitching in a breath, willing the tears back. 'Now they're gone, and I don't know what to say, what to do about the space in my life where they were supposed to fit. No routine crap Kryten can spout is gonna make me feel any better.' She clenches her hands together. 'I don't want to drag this out. I just want to say goodbye to Leah and Liam without a huge drama.'

'Do you want to push the button, or will one of us do it?' Kochanski asks, nodding at the red button - they're always red -- beside the unit.

JayVee reaches up, strokes the plastic with one forefinger, then freezes. 'I can't,' she says. 'I can't.' And starts crying.

In the end, Shayne presses the button for her. The Cat holds JayVee close and they watch, both with tears running down their cheeks. Lister, Rimmer, Kochanski and Kryten just stand apart from them, watching. There's nothing they can say.

* * *

_Six Weeks Later_

'You _what_?'

Kochanski shrugs, looks vaguely embarrassed.

'Does this involve turkey basters and freezer bags with dubious contents?'

JayVee is back to her old self, for the most part. The growing blush on Kochanski's face is her current source of amusement.

'No, it bloody doesn't. It involved a proper medical syringe, young lady,' Kochanski says, 'and proper... um... wigglies.'

'Wigglies?' JayVee snorts Coke out of her nose. 'God. Who's the lucky father?'

'Um,' says Kochanski eloquently. 'Can I say it wasn't the Cat and it wasn't Lister?'

'You made _Rimmer_ jerk off into a Dixie cup?' JayVee sets her cup down and howls with laughter. 'My God, Krissie, I thought it would at _least_ be Lister. Did you, you know, consider doing it naturally?'

'Just because I think Rimmer's vaguely better genetic stock than Lister doesn't mean I want to sleep with him. Besides, Lister and Shayne wouldn't have a bar of it, although I think Rimmer wouldn't've minded. Actually, the reason Rimmer did it instead of Lister was because... well, Dave's a bit sentimental, and he didn't want him and me having a baby when he wouldn't actually be the father, so to speak. It's a whole other zone of commitment there -- besides, Shayne wants to be the "father".'

'Daddy Shayne.' JayVee is having trouble speaking without laughing.

'That's right.'

'Well, with that short hair, she's really got the butch thing going on. It'll have the chance to grow longer now, though. No more chemo.'

'Damn straight.' Kochanski grins.

'_Straight_? On _this_ ship? You're joking,' JayVee says.

'Meh,' says Kochanski.

'So when're you due?'

'Nine months, I'm guessing.'

JayVee groans. 'What, did you get it done and then come downstairs to tell me? That's revolting, Kristine Zoé.'

'I know. Want a refill on your Coke?'

'All life's problems should be so easy to fix.' JayVee watches Kochanski open the fridge door. 'Can I help babysit?'

Kochanski comes to the table with the bottle. 'Of course you can.' Their eyes meet as Kochanski pours. 'In fact, did you find that milk expresser?'

'Mmmm. Not much fun, but I stored what I could in the freezer in the medi-bay.'

'Great. You can do her two AM feeds every night. That'd be great.'

'Krissie?'

'Hmmm?'

'Get. A. Life.'

And they both start laughing again. In JayVee's case it's tremulous and thin, but it's _there_.


	28. New Zodiacs

'What? What's wrong?' Kochanski asks.

Shayne passes her wrist across her eyes, wiping sweat onto her skin just above the glove. 'Nothing. Nothing. I'm paranoid. Don' worry.'

'Shit, Shayne, don't scare me,' JayVee says.

'Are you ready?' Kryten asks Shayne. 'I need you to be ready to take one of them.' He looks at Kochanski. 'I'll need you too, ma'am, for the other one.'

'Ready,' Shayne says, snapping the latex against her wrist and grinning behind the mask.

Kochanski puts a mask on and snaps on gloves as well. 'Ready,' she says.

Kryten goes to work, his plastic forehead wrinkled in concentration. The room is silent, except for a ticking clock and JayVee's occasional cries as another contraction seizes her. Kochanski unfolds two towels onto the second bed.

'We've got a girl, Miss Vaughan,' Kryten announces, handing the first baby over to Kochanski, who busies herself with cleaning. The baby wails steadily.

'That's one, Kryte. I distinctly remember being told two,' JayVee says, panting.

'... and a boy.' Kryten hands the boy to Shayne, who mimics Kochanski's cleaning -- a lot of wet washcloths have been implemented today. The boy is crying as well - neither of the babies fall silent until JayVee reaches for them.

'Keep them out of my way,' Kryten directs, reaching for the tray and the sutures. 'There's work to do yet.' As an afterthought, he adds for the nonexistent record, 'Twins born alive and well, seven past ten PM, Valentine's Day.'

* * *

Finally, JayVee gets to nurse her babies.

'I haven't _got_ any names for boys,' she says, half-giggling. 'Someone bring me my baby name book up, please -- it's on the scanner table. And my tarot cards.' Rimmer goes, grateful for the opportunity not to watch her feeding the babies -- it's a sight that makes him feel strange in a lot of ways.

'How do you plan to choose a name, exactly?' Kochanski asks.

'Open the book. Point,' JayVee says, looking evil.

'Jayv, ya _can't_,' Shayne says. 'What if ya land on Poindexter, or somethin'?'

JayVee looks thoughtful. 'Poindexter, no, but Dexter sounds all right.' She laughs. 'I don't have to do it right now, you know.'

'I assume you have a favourite girl's name,' Kochanski says.

'Yes. She's going to be Leah Kristina, because I'm a hopeless idiot and I wanted to name her after you guys somehow, and because I like Leah and it kind of sounds like Lee...' JayVee's voice is muffled as Kochanski and Shayne lean over and hug her fiercely. The newly named Leah Kristina cries out in surprise around her mouthful of nipple, and Kochanski pulls away and strokes her head, calming the baby easily.

'Isn't there anything else you could try, something meaningful for a boy? David doesn't _have_ a middle name, Rimmer's is Judas, and Kryten's is 2x4B, but there might be someone from the past...' JayVee shakes her head, and Kochanski veers onto another tangent, undaunted. 'So what about someone from a book? You read a lot, have you got any favourite names from books?'

When Rimmer comes back, JayVee is giggling hysterically -- they all are, even Kryten is looking decidedly unprofessional.

'Azkaban Hagrid Harry Ron Dudley Snitch Vaughan?' Someone needs to ban her from reading J.K. Rowling.

'What about Vaughan Vaughan?' Shayne suggests.

'I always liked weasels when I was little. What about Weasel Vaughan?' The mere idea of using 'Cat' as a surname has made JayVee laugh since the beginning -- no way. She looks up and spots Rimmer. 'Oh, the book's here. Bring it on.'

'Are you sure about this?' Kochanski asks, finding a float of seriousness in the sea of giggles.

'Oh, yes. I honestly can't think of any other way to do it. There aren't any men who've made a huge impact on my life, unless you want I should name the kid Hollister or Todhunter.'

'NO,' everyone choruses.

'Good.' JayVee nods her blonde head, settles the book against Leah's head -- she doesn't notice, being half asleep already -- and riffles the pages slowly. 'Cat. Tell me when to stop.'

'Um. Stop,' Cat says three seconds later.

'The L pages,' JayVee says. 'Okay, again, to get the exact name.' She closes her eyes and trails her finger slowly down the page.

'Stop.'

JayVee opens her eyes, giggles when she sees where her finger has landed, and moves it up to the previous entry.

'What?' Kochanski says.

'Oh, I just don't think 'Liane' suits him.' JayVee looks, reads. 'Liam. Liam?' She looks down at the baby. 'Liam, kid?'

The baby yawns.

'Meh. I guess that's a yes?'

'Wait. Leah an' Liam, Jayv?' Shayne asks.

JayVee smiles. 'Yep. Leah and Liam.'

'What about a middle name for him?' Rimmer asks. 'And does _she_ have a middle name?'

'Kristina,' Kochanski says, remembering Rimmer was out of the room. 'Yeah, Jayv, go on and lucky-dip him a middle name.'

JayVee opens the book again, and Cat stops her amongst the A pages. 'Wish this bloody thing was sorted into males and females,' she huffs. 'Okay, gimme stop again.'

'Stop,' the Cat says obligingly when her finger is about to go off the end of the page. JayVee stops, reads, and smiles.

'Right then, Leah Kristina Vaughan and Liam Ascher Vaughan. It's bedtime,' she announces.

* * *

Once the babies are settled into their cot beside JayVee's bed, everyone gathers around the bed. JayVee is too tired to leave the hospital just yet, and it is better, space-wise, for keeping two small babies.

Kryten has put their details into the computer and has two birth certificates printed out. Though the date function on the computer long ago went haywire (power failures, equipment failures), the Births, Deaths and Marriages website is still clued into reality, and registers the two babies as being born at ten-oh-seven AM, fourteenth of February, 3,002,590. The last registered birth before that, according to the site, was at nine AM on the twenty-seventh of April, 2982. Just under three million years difference. That's how long the human race has taken to start regenerating, after whatever happened to stop all births after that long-ago date.

JayVee, eyelids drooping, refuses to sleep until she has read about the children's birthday in her tarot book. They are both Aquarians, and the card for Aquarius is the Star.

'The Star means hope,' she reads, yawning. 'And peace of mind. And good stuff.' The book droops in her hands; she catches it, closes it, and starts shuffling the cards together.

'What're you doing?' Kochanski says. 'Don't you want to sleep?'

'In a minute.' JayVee yawns again. 'I'll just draw a card for each of them first...' She spreads the cards out on the sheet. 'Leah first. This card is Leah,' she says, moving her hand over the cards, picking one out, flicking the book open to the right page. 'The Sun - she'll be powerful, open-hearted, and beautiful, like the sun itself.'

'Which one?' Shayne asks, gesturing at the wall, where they can't see the millions of stars around them, but know they are there.

'All of them,' Lister says unexpectedly. 'This little one's going to be all the suns she wants.' He is stroking Leah's cheek with one finger, gentle, careful with the delicate baby skin, soft as rose petals.

'What about Liam?' Rimmer asks into the sudden silence. 'What's Liam going to be?'

JayVee picks another card.

'The Wheel of Fortune.' She reads the definition. 'He'll be laid back, have a good sense of humour, and be popular. Guess I won't have to send him to his room.'

'Sounds like a good pair you've got there,' Kochanski says, stifling a yawn. She picks the cards up and puts them firmly into the box, ignoring JayVee's pleas to do a full reading. 'In the morning, Jayv. There's always tomorrow.'

The Cat pulls the second bed over, nudging it up against JayVee's bed, and sprawling on it fully dressed. Kochanski says, 'Call us if you need anything,' brushes a kiss over JayVee's cheek, and takes Shayne's hand. Shayne kisses JayVee as well, their eyes meeting for a moment, then Kochanski and Shayne leave for their own room. Lister repeats the words, 'Call us if you need anything,' and he and Rimmer also drop light kisses on JayVee's forehead before they, too, leave the room.

'Are you comfortable, ma'am?' Kryten asks.

JayVee puts her book on the bedside table. 'Just fine, thank you, Kryte.' She pauses. 'Thank you so much for all you've done today.'

'Why, you're welcome.' Kryten has plans for some serious downtime. He's as exhausted as it's possible for a mechanoid to be. 'Shall I switch off the light?'

'Yes, please.'

The light goes off and Kryten goes out. Silence reigns over the medi-bay.

For five minutes.

The earsplitting howl Leah gives wakes her brother, who also begins to wail. Lights snap on and there's a sound like a stampede as everyone runs back into the room.

JayVee picks Leah up and cuddles her close, rocking her gently. 'Pull up a bed, guys,' she says, grinning wearily, dark circles already showing under her violet eyes. 'I have the feeling it's gonna be a long one tonight.'


End file.
